Genes Can Point to Environments That Matter to Advance Public Health.

Source

Peter S. Bearman is with the Department of Sociology, and INCITE, Columbia University, New York, NY.

Abstract

As the call for contributions indicated, The NIH and the AJPH combined efforts to generate this remarkable special issue of the AJPH with the goal of advancing research that integrates knowledge about genetics and social science to better understand human health and development. 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? (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print August 8, 2013: e1-e2. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2013.301550).