Friday, July 6, 2007

Psychiatric Genomics Center

From ScienceDaily:
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has received one of the largest gifts in its history from Theodore and Vada Stanley to establish the Stanley Center for psychiatric Genomics on its Long Island campus. The goal of the Center is to unambiguously diagnose patients with psychiatric disorders based on their DNA sequence in 10 years time.
With a $25 million gift from the Stanley Medical Research Institute, I hope they are successful. Unfortunately, since current beliefs about psychiatric disorders includes both genetic as well as environmental/situational components, I don't know how unambiguous a diagnosis can be, unless they find some way to determine which DNA sequences become activated by stress or other factors.

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