NEW YORK – It is not every day investigators launch a longitudinal genetic study in the hopes that it will be underpowered to deliver significant associations. But that is the situation 23andMe's Adam Auton finds himself in.
"It is the nature of genetic studies that the larger the number of individuals you can have in your study, the more power there is to detect associations," said Auton, a principal scientist at the consumer genomics company. "This is a situation where, if we fail to find anything, that's probably good news."