All in the Family
Study establishing the similarity of human populations named 'best paper'
By Alfred Kildow
On December 20, 2003, precisely a year from its publication in the
American journal Science, a paper from a young postdoc in the Molecular
and Computational Biology group in USC College was chosen as the most
important biomedical research paper in the world for the year 2003.
The Lancet, England’s prestigious medical journal, bestowed the honor
on Noah A. Rosenberg, who, working with colleagues in many fields, from
many institutions, published a paper entitled “Genetic Structure of
Human Populations.”
“In working on this project, we were very fortunate to have had access
to an excellent collection of genetic samples from around the world,”
says Rosenberg.
“Our work is only an initial step toward understanding the relationship
between population ancestry and genetic disease,” he says. “We hope
that future collaborations can link anthropology and genetics to make
advances in medicine.”
Rosenberg expanded on his honored paper in a presentation to the
Viterbi Symposium Dec. 16 entitled “Inference of individual ancestry
from variable markers in the human genome.”
In choosing the paper, the Lancet commented: “The paper by Rosenberg et
al has two messages of utmost importance: one general biological, even
humanistic, and one methodological. The general biological lesson is
that the overwhelming source of human genetic variation is between
individuals and not between ethnic groups. In the paper this becomes
even clearer by the finding that there are no absolute genetic
differences between ethnic groups: the differences that exist are in
relative frequencies only.
“The methodological lesson is that for genetic risk assessment it
follows that investigators can use standard epidemiological study
designs, provided self-reported ethnic background is taken into
account: for such risk assessment one should not worry about ‘genetic
admixture.The most enlightening aspect of the paper, however, is the
insight that it gives in the ‘genetic structure of human
populations’—the very title of the paper.”
The paper also illustrates the changing, interdisciplinary,
international nature of science. Rosenberg’s co-authors were from the
Department of Human Genetics, University of Chicago; the Center for
Medical Genetics, Marshfield Medical Research Foundation, Wisconsin;
the Foundation Jean Dausset-Centre d’Etude du Polymorphisme Humain
(CEPH), Paris; the Department of Genetics, Yale University School of
Medicine; the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, Russian Academy of
Sciences, Moscow, and the Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford
University.
Other nominated papers included the identification of the SARS
coronavirus, a vaccine trial of the human papilloma virus and the
Million Women Study highlighting the increased risk of breast cancer
from combination hormone replacement therapy.Lancet editor Richard
Horton said, “No existing prize in science or medicine recognizes the
vital importance of multidisciplinary collaboration.
“This is a fatal flaw in, for example, the Nobel [Prize] awards. With
this prize, we aim to salute truly first-class advances in thinking or
practice which would otherwise go unnoticed by the contemporary
establishment of science.”
|
|
|
