Whalefall

When these studies showed up in my pre-embargo pipeline, I made a quick note of them — see above — and moved on. I’m already reporting for a long-form article on the disappointment of genomics, and this didn’t feel like a Wired daily news story

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And they were inevitable, pure and simple. Nature made sure of it: they announced their findings in a press conference held at the World Conference on Science Journalism. Their press package contained five different press releases, full of glowing language — “breakthrough,” “landmark,” “major step forward.” Given that Nature recently published a series of essays on the problems of science journalism — that it’s uncritical, depends on press releases, etc. etc. — their behavior could be seen as schizophrenic.

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But Wade, who arrived at the Times in 1981, seems to have finally lost patience with the “gene-linked-to-(fill in the blank)” narrative that he and so many others told, and were sold, for so long. In April, he did provided excellent coverage of a series of New England Journal of Medicine articles debating the usefulness of assorted genome-scanning methods. Underlying that debate was the failure of genome association studies to provide useful insights into disease. Appropriately enough, schizophrenia was used to illustrate the problems:

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Dr. Goldstein argues that the genetic burden of common diseases must be mostly carried by large numbers of rare variants. In this theory, schizophrenia, say, would be caused by combinations of 1,000 rare genetic variants, not of 10 common genetic variants

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