Summing up cancer stem cells

Abstract

A paper published this week in Nature marks the culmination of a long debate about the genetic basis of a disorder sometimes considered psychiatry’s heartland -- schizophrenia. No other psychiatric condition has evoked such diverse opinions. Its biological roots have often been denied and, in the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1970s, there was even outright rejection of its existence. The latest paper, from the Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, reports an analysis of more than 150,000 people and finds more than 100 genetic regions associated with schizophrenia, laying to rest forever the idea that genetics is not an important cause of the illness.