There is an intriguing new paper suggesting that people in your social network may be more or less likely than chance to share specific genes with you. I haven’t quite wrapped my head around all the analysis (Daniel MacArther at Genetic Future has a good summary), but this being one of those papers that was all over the news before actual publication, I was quite struck by some of the criticism:

“If this was a study looking for shared genes in patients with diabetes, it would not be up to the standards of the field. We set these standards after 10 years of seeing so many irreproducible results in gene-association studies.” — David Altshuler

It certainly is a provocative study — I would have loved to have seen it done with information from the rest of the genome. — Stanley Nelson

Only six SNPs were studied in an association study and such sweeping conclusions were arrived at? Were the reviewers not geneticists? — Tabrez Siddiqui

In other words, don’t do this study, do another, much more expensive study in its place.

Don’t get sidetracked by the p-values or multiple comparisons. Replicating the direction and effect size in two samples is very strong evidence that there these genes are influence the formation of friendships to the degree estimated.

These results should put the authors in a good position to secure funding to do further genotyping in their sample. That is the way funding should work, I think: show some cost-effective results and then do the larger study. What if they’d done it the other way around? gotten funding for GWAS and then not found anything. That would have been a terrible waste but given the apparent bias that the more expensive a study is to conduct the more worthwhile, this must be happening a lot.

Along with open protocols, open data, and open access, publications can start including project expenses as supplementary material. We explicitly reward people for getting grants (during hiring and promotion) but not for doing science on the cheap.