This post is a review of The Social Genome: The New Science Of Nature and Nurture. By Dalton Conley. W.W. Norton & Company. 292 pp. $29.99. A breakthrough in socio-genomics, the polygenic index (PGI) ...

Arun Durvasula has received funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Science. Sitting in my doctor’s examination room, I was surprised when she told me, “Genetics ...

A new genetic mapping strategy reveals how entire networks of genes work together to cause disease, filling in the missing links left by traditional genetic studies. The technique could transform how ...

Most genes are ancient and shared across species. But a small subset of genes are relative newcomers, spontaneously emerging from stretches of DNA that once encoded nothing at all. Now, after nearly a ...

Genome-wide association studies and rare-variant burden tests are the two main tools for discovering links between genetic variants and traits. Comparisons of their results reveal that they ...

Thanks to increasingly efficient and affordable gene sequencing technologies, we can now chart our genetic blueprint in unprecedented detail. But what does each gene do? Of the roughly 20,000 genes ...

A large genetic screen has revealed how stem cells transform into brain cells, exposing hundreds of genes that make this process possible. Among the discoveries is PEDS1, a gene now linked to a ...

Dr. Conley is the author of “The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture.” Since Francis Galton coined the phrase “nature versus nurture” 150 years ago, the debate about what makes us who ...

For decades, geneticists have known that most common illnesses are not caused by a single rogue gene but by intricate constellations of DNA variants acting together in specific cells. Now a new ...

Genetic research is finally starting to explain how DNA risk scores translate into real disease, not just in single genes but across entire biological networks. Instead of treating each variant as an ...