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'One of the great hopes for studying complex disorders is that the new tools of human genomics will help in dissecting the multiple factors underlying individual responses to those factors.'
The articles published in this special issue of Pharmacogenomics culminate from a multidisciplinary group of researchers, demonstrating that data integration and multidisciplinary collaboration can yield novel approaches for handling large, complex data sets and reveal new insight and relevance to a complex illness such as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Data were generated from a 2-day clinical study of CFS and comprised clinical, genomic and genetic information. The data, including over 500 clinical and epidemiological measurements and 20,000 gene expression measurements, was shared with 20 investigators who were challenged with integrating the data to delineate the heterogeneity of the study population and identify biological correlates of CFS.
As Suzanne Vernon and William Reeves describe in their overview of the Wichita (KS, USA) CFS project [1], diseases such as CFS are a major challenge to public health and to investigators trying to understand the causes of such disorders. One of the great hopes for studying complex disorders is that the new tools of human genomics will help in dissecting the multiple factors underlying individual responses to those factors. Genetic and biochemical individuality was recognized long ago, and this editorial discusses pharmacogenomics in the historical context of the development of human genetics.
Just over 100 years ago, the first step was taken in understanding the genetic basis of human disorders. Archibald Garrod, then a young physician working at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, UK, observed a patient with urine that turned black on exposure to air. This was not a new observation, as was clear from the monograph that Garrod published in 1909, Inborn Errors of Metabolism [2]. What was new was Garrod's recognition of the inherited nature of alkaptonuria and his suspicion that its pattern of inheritance might conform to the then newly discovered research of Gregor Mendel. Garrod wrote to William Bateson, the champion and promoter of Mendel's work, for his opinion. Bateson included a footnote in one of his reports to the Evolution Committee of the Royal Society noting that, indeed, Garrod's findings and his review of the literature on alkaptonuria indicated that alkaptonuria...