I have no wish to criticize these findings as such. But the way in which this paper is written is striking. The negative results are passed over as quickly as possible. This despite the fact that they are very clear and easy to interpret - the rs1344706 variant has no effect on cognitive task performance or neural activation. It is not a cognition gene, at least not in healthy volunteers.

By contrast, the genetic association with connectivity is modest (see the graphs above - there is a lot of overlap), and very difficult to interpret, since it is clearly not associated with any kind of actual differences in behaviour.

And yet this positive result got the experiment published in no less a journal than Science! The negative results alone would have struggled to get accepted anywhere, and would probably have ended up either unpublished, or published in some rubbish minor journal and never read. It's no wonder the authors decided to write their paper in the way they did. They were just doing the smart thing. And they are perfectly respectable scientists - Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, the senior author, has done some excellent work in this and other fields.

Labels: Genetics