The genomic era arrives, and this time is probably real
It&#x27;s laughable that they led with the genetic cause for schizophrenia which (a) probably doesn&#x27;t exist and (b) wasn&#x27;t found a few months ago; they found a weak statistical association across a large number of variants that explains &lt; 3.5% of the variability in disease susceptibility. What this demonstrates is what we&#x27;ve learned over and over across the past decade with association studies: yes, we&#x27;re a product of our genes, and variation affects us, but no, common diseases are probably not mostly driven by genetics.<p>For me, the big story in genomics over the past few years is one of massive failure. We spent a lot of time and effort sequencing tumors in the hopes that the genetics would tell us something interesting and lead to cures. It did not. We now have a relatively complete cabinet of the major variants that drive tumors. Most of these variants we already knew about before we did these genomics studies (through older sequencing methods from decades prior), and most of what we learned tells us nothing new.<p>Genetics is at this point mostly garbage information. Why? Because we don&#x27;t know what it means. We still don&#x27;t understand gene expression, we don&#x27;t understand signal transduction, and we can&#x27;t understand the effects of mutations without painstaking characterization. All of these things mean our sudden wealth of knowledge of genetic variation tells us fuck-all about biology.