> This burst of activity represents a frustrated thought that “it is time to become impatient with the old view”, as Ball says. Genetics alone cannot help us to understand and treat many of the diseases that cause the biggest health-care burdens, such as schizophrenia, cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
Does anyone actually subscribe to this "old view"? Surely the majority of scientists, medical professionals, and laymen alike understand environmental factors play a huge part in this. Why make a call to action to address a imagined state of affairs?
I can personally attest that some medical professionals have a pretty dismal broad understanding of genetics and evolution. And besides, even if the book isn't breaking new ground, or is targeting a more a popular audience, a good writer synthesizing developments in a field and providing fresh metaphors for understanding it can be tremendously beneficial, even to the academic side, I think. There's also an element of marketing and puffery in how authors talk about their new books.
All that said, yeah. I've for a long time liked the simple idea that the organism is the product of interaction between genes and their environment. That simple notion alone banishes many of the supposed misapprehensions under attack in this article.
Some idiots (on both sides) seem to think "nature vs nurture" must have a single winner. Some slightly less stupid people like to strawman all their opponents as thinking that. This seems to be yet another example of the latter.
A reliable career-advancing publication in the life sciences often follows the pattern: Look, everybody! We've found a genetic marker for X! Here's how we sequenced the organisms, and here are the stats we ran to identify this particular gene or constellation of genes.
This was exciting research in the 90s, but now gene sequencing is routine and the results just get added to the pile. It's scientific chum.
This book's authors, the review author, and the editors at Nature who decided this review was worth publishing and under what headline, would like to coordinate a shift away from this kind of low-impact publication.
To make significant contribution, you can't just identify a marker for cancer or dinosaurism: you need to actually attempt to cure cancer or turn people into dinosaurs.
It's not like that kind of research is value-less though. It's still important to do that kind of thing, firstly for practical purposes such map is useful, and secondly it can help with building a more fundamental theory. (The same is true of the "particle zoo" before the Standard Model was developed in Physics). I don't think stopping doing it means you'll get the big breakthrough any faster, in fact it'll slow things down.
It seems people think that, if we just focus more on Kuhn's "revolutionary science" instead of incremental, "normal science", we'll get more paradigm-shifting theories.
It could just be that paradigm-shifting breakthroughs are exponentially harder to find, and that it's not just a matter of "we just didn't look hard enough"
"We found a genetic marker for X" is even more fuzzy when talking about something like Schizophrenia or Autism, because the diagnosis itself is very far from a precise label. It's not just about missing environmental contributions or dealing with how complex interactions between different generic markers are, though these are also issues. We're averaging over probably dozens of different issues in the vast majority of studies, and that extends to other subfields of biological psychiatry too.
Not sure about in the sciences, but large companies and their funders still do. e.g., 23AndMe, which still wants to become profitable through drug development based pretty much only on DNA sequencing data.
I agree with the article, it's a paradigm that peaked 20 years ago, and has been outdated for about a decade.
But I'm not being absolutely critical since I'm only viewing from the sidelines and perhaps there is still something important to be gained correlating genetics with disease for cases where there is little hope of a standard diagnosis.
> Precision Medicine, on the other hand, is an innovative approach that takes into account individual differences in people’s genes, environments, and lifestyles.
That seems to be a far cry from asserting genetic determinism. Can you explain what you were trying to communicate with that link?
Even in this most simplified form, it's clear genes don't determine all of the outcome. You're Y% more likely to get a disease, with other factors affecting how the dice actually fall.
> Surely the majority of scientists, medical professionals, and laymen alike understand environmental factors play a huge part in this.
The majority of laypeople have no idea what you are talking about, and if they know anything, I would guess from colloquial language that they 'know' your 'genes' are inherited and determine things about you, in a way you can't change or avoid.
I'm not criticising the laypeople (or flattering us), but pointing out that we are in a bubble ... on another planet ... in a different universe ....
I expect that more scientists and medical professionals are back on planet Earth (i.e., unaware) than you imagine. Who else would the OP be targeted at?
The article is disorienting, and it glosses over the real issues. “It's time to admit that the water is wet”, oh yes.
“The view of biology” they talk about doesn't exist. What exists is pop-science, with its acolytes and proselytes, boldly claiming that everything is as easy as 1-2-3:
1) We just make a list of All The Genes.
2) We put All The Data into the Computer.
3) We solve any problem by finding a relevant connection.
Just imagine how much nonsense was said about “genes”, from racial cleansing projects to self-help books — or reasoning why corner store closed. As we are speaking about all kinds of genealogy, it is worth mentioning that pop science is a distant cousin of real science, and is closer to 19th century militant vulgar materialism, the kind of marketplace “science” which promised that corpses would get reanimated by wondrous electricity in the same manner it made frog's leg move. “Only need to figure enough details”, as usual. Now “genes” or “evolution” are just a way for common people to talk about “fate” or “dog-eat-dog” in “scientific” terms.
With that sorted out, we can study the scientists. Unfortunately, a lot of them aren't that different from the general public in understanding that for each efficiency of some model, there is a corresponding deficiency. Educated people honestly ask why we shouldn't use computer metaphors so carelessly all the time. It's like asking why hammers can't be used for everything, or why integers exist when we can use floating point for everything (and also deliberately ignore the complexities because “we're dealing with general cases, we don't need that”). Is there something wrong with the hammer? No, there isn't, something is wrong with the people who don't really understand what they are doing.
So the book review basically says “Fine, we all know it's a pathetic circus, but it's our circus, and lots of people are trained to play their parts, so let's declare some patented nonsense outdated, do a facelift, an go on”.
Does anyone actually subscribe to this "old view"? Surely the majority of scientists, medical professionals, and laymen alike understand environmental factors play a huge part in this. Why make a call to action to address a imagined state of affairs?