Aggregated News
The title of my blog post is provocative, I know, but I’m actually just lifting it from the title of a new commentary in the journal Molecular Psychiatry by Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institutes of Mental Health. In his piece, Insel expresses his excitement about a new way of thinking about how genes can contribute to our risk of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. It’s based on an emerging understanding of the human genome that I explored in a recent story for the New York Times: each of us does not carry around a single personal genome, but many personal genomes.
When we start out as a single fertilized egg, we have a single genome. When the cell divides in two, there’s a tiny chance that any spot in the DNA will mutate. Over many divisions, the copies of that original genome accumulate mutations and become different from one another. Scientists only now have the tools to dig into this so-called mosaicism and see how different our genomes can become.
Scientists have long known that...
When we start out as a single fertilized egg, we have a single genome. When the cell divides in two, there’s a tiny chance that any spot in the DNA will mutate. Over many divisions, the copies of that original genome accumulate mutations and become different from one another. Scientists only now have the tools to dig into this so-called mosaicism and see how different our genomes can become.
Scientists have long known that...