2013 Articles

Genes Can Point to Environments That Matter to Advance Public Health

Bearman, Peter Shawn

It has become almost routine—as one discovers in reading these articles—to bemoan the fact that despite an enormous investment of research energy, the promise of sequencing the human genome for understanding human health and behavior has not been fully realized. There are many reasons for this. One simple idea is that this may be a story of looking for the keys we dropped on the street only underneath the streetlight—people have been looking for answers in the wrong place, that is, at the genome. What if the sequencing promise is to be found not in the genome but instead in a better understanding of the social and cultural factors that shape health?