Genetic Disease II
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Genetic Disease II Genetic Epidemiology of 150 Common or Informative Diseases1 Larry Leon Mai
GENETIC EPIDEMIOLOGY2 In 1874, when Charles Darwin’s younger cousin Francis Galton published English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture, Galton was no doubt aware of Shakespeare’s priority, for when Prospero spoke of Caliban in 1611, calling him “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick; …,”3 one of the most entrenched dialectics in all of biology was born. The impasse, widened in 1690 by John Locke’s now well-worn metaphor of the newborn mind as a tabula rasa,4 a blank slate on which nature had scribbled nothing, became contentious when Galton insisted, to the contrary, that nature had ordained not language itself, but differential capacities for language; not genius, but differential predispositions for the realization of genius. It was as if Galton had supposed that nature had indeed written on Locke’s clean slate, but that she had written her messages in invisible ink, and that the slate had to be held over a flame before the messages could be read. Somewhere between these polarized philosophical views, between the nature uber alles of Galton and the environmental determinism of Locke, an empirical middle ground is currently being excavated, a middle ground that rejects neither view and that successfully incorporates components from each. Nowhere has this become clearer than in the complex interactions of disease agents, disease vectors, and the gene-based responses of their human hosts.
Genetic epidemiology is the study of genetic elements of disease, and is a growing methodology for understanding how those elements function in complex biological systems. Genetic epidemiologists seek to discover and understand the genetic basis of diseases, traits with complex inheritance patterns, and risk factors associated with gene-based diseases within specific environmental contexts (Mai, Young Owl, & Kersting, 2004; Motulsky, 1984). The conjunction of the terms “genetic” and “epidemiology” at first may seem a forced blend; an attempt to meld two separate approaches that is doomed to chronic marbling rather than
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