© IMAGES.COM/CORBISWhen Anne Bassett told colleagues in the late 1980s that she was planning to study the genetics of schizophrenia, they winced. “People thought I was going into a field without a lot of promise,” she says.
To some degree those people were right. Schizophrenia seemed to have an inherited component, because it was known to run in families, yet no one seemed to be able to find its genetic roots. Even as DNA sequencing technologies advanced, and genes associated with Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis, and other inherited disorders were identified, schizophrenia researchers were coming up empty-handed.
It was an early hint at the now notorious complexity of schizophrenia genetics. The diversity of symptoms in patients was similarly inscrutable. “Anybody who thought schizophrenia was easy has never seen a patient with the disorder,” says Patrick Sullivan, who studies the genomics of psychiatric disease at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. “It’s called a complex trait for a damned good reason.”
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