As usual, the press releases and the stories based on those somewhat overstate how far the new study finding takes us on the way to an effective treatment. One

As usual, the press releases and the stories based on those somewhat overstate how far the new study finding takes us on the way to an effective treatment. One of my mentors is a very eminent psychologist (Irving Gottesman) who has spent much of his lifetime (he is old enough to be my father, and I am middle-aged) studying schizophrenia from the genetic point of view.[1] His early paper with an older collaborator Gottesman, I. I., and J. Shields. "Schizophrenia: geneticism and environmentalism." Human heredity 21.6 (1971): 517-522. was controversial when it was published, because as Freudianism waned, there was still the supposition among most psychologists then living that parenting was the single biggest influence on the development of mental illness. When a behavioral trait runs in families, the working assumption is that it is passed from parent to child, but the tricky issue to figure out is whether it is passed mostly by parenting practices (culturally) or by descent (genetically). Gottesman used to be almost alone among psychologists in proposing that the greater influence on development of schizophrenia is genetic, and it took many studies of twins and other close relatives and other study methodologies gradually to make genetic studies of schizophrenia the mainstream approach to research. That said, there are known cases of identical (monozygotic) twins who are discordant for schizophrenia,[2] so everyone who is active in research on schizophrenia agrees that environmental influences after birth of some kind matter in the development of schizophrenia in an individual patient. Moreover, "the risk to schizophrenia is influenced by quite a large number of common variants, each with a very small effect on risk. How large is not yet clear, but Purcell's analyses suggest that hundreds and more likely thousands of individual genes contribute to the liability to schizophrenia."[3] The current study, covered in many different popular press reports, indicates a likely gene locus for influence on one clinical finding found in many but not all cases of schizophrenia. Discordant identical twins make very clear that something else matters for the development of schizophrenia. To date, we are a long way from taking the recent genome analysis finding to a stage of testing out any kind of intervention in human patients. First we will have to be sure that the finding replicates in another human patient data set, and then characterize how often that finding occurs in schizophrenic patients, and how often it is missing in healthy controls. There will have to be careful work to find out if any treatment based on the new finding is both safe and effective. But it's a start, and finding out things like this is the research to support basic science research. [1] http://www.psych.umn.edu/people/profile.php?UID=gotte003 http://www.psych.umn.edu/people/profile.php?UID=gotte003 https://news.virginia.edu/content/irving-gottesman-retired-psychology-professor-awarded-groundbreaking-research https://news.virginia.edu/content/irving-gottesman-retired-p... [2] http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/textonlyarchive/March_1994/94-03-10_Identical_Twins_Do_Not_Have_Identical_Risk_of_Mental_Illness,_New_Book_Shows.txt http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/textonlyarchive/March_1994/9... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDPlktZrGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDPlktZrGI [3] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-genes-influence-behavior-9780199559909?cc=us&lang=en& https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-genes-influence-...