With thick black glasses and hair slicked over a balding head, Maynard Olsen looks the part of a genetics professor. Wired News delivered to your inbox or hand-held device. Like many revolutionary ideas, his point is simple.
Researchers trying to develop drugs focus on figuring out why people get diseases.
Most of the activity in genetic research is focused on finding disease-associated genes. Almost every day it seems one researcher or another announces a new gene discovery. But it's no simple task to fix broken genes, and this approach is getting researchers nowhere fast, Olsen said. Researchers find a disease gene, but the discovery offers no way to intervene in the disease pathway. He used as an example a gene called BRCA-1, which has been shown to be associated with a higher risk of breast cancer.