Better living through genetics
Q: So the Herald headline asks “Could this drug stop hair going grey?” Could it?
A: Which drug?
Q: The one in the story?
A: There isn’t a drug in the story.
Q: Ok, what is in the story and why do the Herald and the Daily Telegraph think it’s a drug?
A: There’s a gene. Called IRF4
Q: So people can be given this gene and their hair will stop going grey?
A: No, everyone already has this gene. That’s how genes work.
Q: You know what I mean. The version of the gene that stops greying; are the scientists are going to give people that?
A: No.
Q: What, then?
A: “They are confident that it will be possible to produce drugs or cosmetics to switch it off.”
Q: How confident should I be?
A: Well, we’ve known one of the gene responsible for baldness for about a decade…
Q: So I shouldn’t hold my breath. How much of hair greyness does this genetic variant explain?
A: Among people old enough for it to matter, about 0.1 points on a 5-point scale where most people were 1 or 2.
Q: That doesn’t sound like that much.
A: A lot more of the hair greyness seemed to be genetic, just not explained by that one genetic variant
Q: Doesn’t that make it worse for trying to make drugs?
A: Yes, but more interesting for science
Q: I think you have your priorities wrong.
A: Then you won’t be interested in the stories that talk about the real point of the research and its findings.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »