Sunday, March 27, 2016

Siddhartha Mukherjee on Schizophrenia

Madness runs in the family A breakthrough interweaved with stories from his famikly:
"McCarroll assigned the problem to Aswin Sekar, a twenty-four-year-old student in his lab who was working toward an M.D.-Ph.D. at Harvard. “Geneticists considered it an almost intractable problem, but Aswin wanted something substantial—a real puzzle to crack" ......
Sekar e-mailed the data to McCarroll on the evening of December 31st. “We had friends for New Year’s Eve dinner that night, and the doorbell had just rung when the e-mail popped up,” McCarroll recalled. “Of course, I barely spoke to the guests. It was an unbelievable result. A kid in his twenties walks into a lab, defines the variations in one of the most complex regions of the human genome, and shows how the variants might underlie the risk of schizophrenia. Data that had puzzled so many people for so many years suddenly seemed to make sense.”

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