Abstract
Unravelling the human genome has not automatically bathed the patient's bedside in a helpful new light. Indeed, there are those who wonder if the promise might have been exaggerated. The more extreme of those doubters will perhaps be silenced only by medically significant discoveries for common and complex illnesses rather than rarer single-gene disorders. Success judged that way has been modest, so far. The genetic epidemiologist is a newish breed of specialist (the International Genetic Epidemiology Society was founded in 1992) who possesses or is developing the tools needed to find out the degree to which coronary heart disease, for example, has genetic determinants and where the gene or genes might lie, and to tease out the causative contributions of genes and environment and interactions between the two.
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