Genetics in Medicine at Twenty

Social Medicine in the Twenty-First Century

I n its launch issue in October 2004, PLoS Medicine signaled a strong interest in creating a journal that went beyond a biological view of health to incorporate socioeconomic, ethical, and cultural dimensions. For example, that fi rst issue contained a policy paper on how the health community should respond to violent political confl ict [1], a debate on whether health workers should screen all...

Quantitative Genetics in Behavioral Medicine

A striking characteristic of almost all of the traits of interest in behavioral medicine is that they show large individual differences, which often follow an approximate normal distribution. For behavioral traits this distribution is thought to derive from a number of nature/nurture variance components, schematically depicted in Fig. 28.1. Starting with the genes block, this scheme posits that...

Race, Genetics and Medicine

Twenty-five years ago in genetics: the infinite allele model.

Have you ever considered this problem? Suppose every mutant is to an entirely different allele (or at least is counted this way, so that the only homozygosity is homozygosity by descent). Under such a system with a finite population of size n what is the proportion of homozygous loci at equilibrium? Perhaps you have already solved this, but I am not sure. Some of Josh’s work suggests that every...

Genetics, parenting, and children's rights in the twenty-first century.

Not only do genetic traits sometimes translate into physical and mental illnesses, they may also manifest themselves as tendencies towards certain behaviours. This discovery has led to the misinterpretation and misapplication of genetic information, and has been directed to unforeseen uses, from criminal defence to genetic racism. The issue is especially sensitive when deciding if and when pare...