Interviewee: Stephen Fodor. Stephen Fodor talks about the need to look broadly across the genome to find the relationship between genes and health in different people. (DNAi Location: Applications > Genes and medicine > Genetic profiling > Stephen Fodor > Effects of DNA variation on health)

We have a large challenge ahead of us, and that is to understand the effects of DNA variation between individuals. And these are going to be big studies, because we have to understand that there are some three billion base pairs in the human genome, and we have to screen the differences between any two individuals and try to correlate that with human health or disease. Now most common human diseases that we look at today, such as heart disease, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and so on are diseases that we believe are multigenic, they involve a number of different genes, not just one gene, but maybe ten, maybe twenty, maybe several hundred. We don't know the answer to this yet and so we really do need to look broadly across the genome and start to draw these correlations between variation in the genome and health outcomes.

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