Why GWAS's are evil
OK, yes, I know that genome-wide association studies have identified some important genetic effects but there are some important downsides too. I truthfully do not know whether the benefits have outweighed the costs. Why am I saying this? (None of this is supposed to be original. Conversely, I am not going to go to the trouble to find the myriad of people who may have said the same thing first. So sue me. I think that's what blogs are for?) Here are some pertinent points: Nobody believes anything if it's not in a GWAS Studies which would previously have been judged to give perfectly respectable evidence to implicate a candidate gene are nowadays completely ignored because the stupid GWAS missed said gene. People don't believe a candidate gene study which yields a corrected p value of 0.001 derived from 20 markers but they do believe a GWAS which produces one p value of 10^-8. There is no logic in this position. But a lot of people take this attitude. At a recent confe