In fact, the candidate-gene approach throughout human genetics
was pursued for about ten or 15 years, and over those ten or
15 years, not a lot came out of the candidate-gene approach.
And this is something that as we go through the remainder of the course,
it'll come back a couple times, and
I'll talk a little bit about maybe why that was the case.
But, the, one last anecdote before we,
we kind of get into the thick of genome wide association studies.
The Sanders paper was published in two 2008.
And I teach a course here at the,
at the University of Minnesota in behavioral genetics.
And when I taught the course in 2008, or 2009, or even maybe in 2010, and I talked
about schizophrenia in that course, I had to end the course on the Sanders study.
Which is really a very disappointing result, right, they didn't find anything.
And but none the less that was the state of the field.
Fortunately, after the Sanders et al study was published,
another approach came along.
And in my opinion, this approach has made remarkable progress
in helping us understand the genetics of schizophrenia.
And that approach is called the Genome, a Genome-Wide Association Study.
And in a candidate-gene study, we're targeting a certain region of the genome.
In a Genome-Wide Association Study, we're studying the whole genome.
We're not picking or hedging our bets ahead of time,
saying this is the gene that we think is important.
We're going to look everywhere.