Genes in their environment: how can we read the riddles?

Once upon a time, as all the best children’s stories begin, a lot of clever geneticists began a huge hunt for the “asthma gene.” At first they thought they had found it, but then more andmore of the hunters found different “asthma genes,” and sometimes some gene hunters could not find the gene that previous hunters thoughtwas thekeyone. Life becamemore and more confusing, and the root causes, which should have been thought of right from the start, have only recently begun to be identified. These include that there are many types of asthma, not likely all to have the same background, and thus careful clinical phenotyping is essential; that genes do not operate in isolation, but in their environment (which includes other genes around them), and this may modify their effects, and even completely reverse them.Also, statistical dangers lie inwait for thosewhomerely collectDNA, feed it all into a good computer and turn the handle; and detailed attention to methodology is needed. The purpose of this editorial is to place the nice study of de Faria et al. into the context of current issues for genetic association studies.