Nov 20 2009
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“ Whatever business errors deCode may have made, a principal reason for its downfall is scientific — the genetic nature of human disease has turned out to be far more complex than thought. Many researchers expected that just a handful of genetic mutations would explain most cases of any given major disease. But the mutations that deCode and others detected in each disease turned out to account for a small fraction of the overall incidence. Natural selection seems to be much more efficient than expected at ridding the population of dangerous genes, even of those that act well after the age of reproduction. That leaves thousands of different mutations, each very rare in the population, as the probable culprit. And because most of the mutations are rare, they are extremely hard to find. The mutations that deCode detected in each major disease were responsible for too few cases to support the development of widely used diagnostic tests or blockbuster drugs.
