Leave That GWAS Alone

The New York Times profiles Duke's David Goldstein, calling him a dissenting voice above the common disease/common variant hypothesis. Goldstein says that common diseases are probably caused by many rare variants and that doing more and more genome-wide association studies will largely be fruitless. "It's an astounding thing that we have cracked open the human genome and can look at the entire complement of common genetic variants, and what do we find? Almost nothing. That is absolutely beyond belief," he says. Goldstein also has a new book, called Jacob's Legacy, that recounts his studies into Jewish genetic history.