They are unable to organize people at a corporation where they were never able to get a job, or the university from which they had to drop out, or in a professional society they were unable to join. As researchers, our Holy Grail has been to understand the basic biology of schizophrenia. It is safe to say that in the past ten years we probably have learned more about the basic biology of this disease and its promise for future treatment and prevention than in all previous years of studying it. We have known for a long time that people inherit something that increases their risk of manifesting schizophrenia. We have learned from studying twins that identical twins are much more likely to share schizophrenia than fraternal twins.
Identical twins share virtually all of their genetics.
Fraternal twins share 50 percent of their genes, just like siblings born years apart. Children of schizophrenic parents, even if the children have been adopted away at birth, are much more likely later in life to manifest schizophrenia than children of normal individuals, even if the children of normal parents have been adopted by schizophrenic parents. With the new technologies for studying DNA, it is possible to look in families for pieces of the human genome, pieces of DNA that are inherited along with illness in these families. We are only at the beginning of the search for specific genes, and there probably are a number of different ones that conspire to provide risk for schizophrenia. Unlike the genes for Huntington's disease or muscular dystrophy, these genes in and of themselves do not make one schizophrenic.