This article by Derek Lowe has been published in the journal Science. It begins:
“I wrote a couple of years ago about the long-running study of mutations in a serotonin transporter gene. Over the years, polymorphism in the gene have been correlated with all sorts of human behavior and psychiatry, in keeping with the importance of serotonin signaling in human cognition. Depression, anxiety, that whole end of human behavior seemed to be affected by just what sort of genetic variation one had. Hundreds and hundreds of studies have appeared in the literature, many of them with truly impressive p-values.
Well, as that old post shows, people have been throwing cold water on this idea for a while now as well, and now there’s a paper that should (you’d think) expunge the whole idea of 5-HTTLPR variations having anything coherent to tell us about human disease. It doesn’t stop there: the authors go on to demolish every other ‘depression gene’ connection in the existing literature …”
You can read more from here.
