Social and Behavioral Sciences for National Security Proceedings of a Summit (2017) / Chapter Skim
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6 Third Research Session: Behavioral Genetics
6 Third Research Session: Behavioral Genetics
Pages 35-44
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From page 35... ...
Panelists included Benjamin Neale, assistant professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, and David Cesarini, associate professor in economics at New York University. Each panelist presented an overview of his research program and highlighted key findings, methodologies, data considerations, and relevance to the work of analysts in the intelligence community (IC)
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From page 36... ...
at a million or more places in the genome very cheaply, and the cost of sequencing DNA has come down significantly,2 making it feasible to study the entire genomes of many individuals. According to Hyman, as more and more DNA samples are analyzed and convergent information about genetic variance accumulates, scientists are expanding their understanding of disease mechanisms, including disorders of cognition and behavior, but also biological contributors to many normal physical and behavioral traits.
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From page 37... ...
According to Neale, "in the last 15 years, [science has advanced to] mapping of the human genome outright, characterization of genetic variation in populations, in particular the single nucleotide polymorphisms, the single base pair changes, and the correlation across those different genetic variants .
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From page 38... ...
Neale stated that all behavioral traits have some genetic basis, and combining genetic and phenotypic information will help build better predictors. Genetic prediction continues to improve as sample sizes increase and polygenic risk scores are created.
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From page 39... ...
Historically, the most common research approach has been what is known as a candidate-gene study. The candidate-gene studies would test hypotheses of biological function for particular genetic variants (i.e., a small set of SNPs4)
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From page 40... ...
The power of prediction will vary across the complexity of the phenotype. He explained that eye color is comparatively easier to determine from DNA samples because there are just a handful of specific genetic variants that govern the vast majority of variability in eye color in the population, in contrast to height, for which there are thousands of genetic effects, each contributing a very little bit to the overall expected physical trait.
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From page 41... ...
asked the panelists how privacy and privacy consent are managed in the international studies. Neale reported that their strategy is to divorce every indi vidual identifier from the genetic data and phenotypic information, with the exception of individuals who are under an appropriate institutional review board (IRB)
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From page 42... ...
Hyman acknowledged this area of research could be useful, but current studies using brain imaging and electroencephalograms are very expensive, and so progress is advancing at a slower rate than the genetics work. The genetics work has progressed rapidly in the past decade because of decreasing costs of microarrays, computation, and sequencing, thus permitting the study of large numbers of humans to achieve statistical power.
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From page 43... ...
Lessons learned from the genetics work include focusing on scale, consistent effects, statistical standards, and reproducibility. Paul Glimcher stressed that even if every genome from every person on Earth was included in GWAS research, traits could not be predicted with 100 percent accuracy.
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