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FOCUS ON RESEARCH Previous Volume 358:2760-2763 June 26, 2008 Number 26 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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The observations of finches that Charles Darwin made while in the Galapagos contributed to his theory of the origins of interspecies differences, ultimately leading to our understanding of mutation and natural selection as drivers of phenotypic variation. Now, more than 150 years later, genomewide association studies have identified more than 100 new chromosomal regions at which DNA variation influences risk of common human diseases and clinical phenotypes.¹ Since previous approaches to identifying genetic causes of common diseases have met with very limited success, this moment constitutes a watershed in the history of genetics in medicine.

Although associations with common single-nucleotide . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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Dr. Hunter is a professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, and a statistical consultant for the Journal. Dr. Altshuler is a professor in the Departments of Genetics and Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. Dr. Rader is a professor of medicine and pharmacology and associate director of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia.

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