Read Michael Specter on anti-vaccine activists, Amy Davidson on the Nature study, and Specter's feature about the Decode project.
But scientific knowledge is a blessing too, and the results of the Decode study should not be ignored.
The Decode team believes it has found the gene, which is called Neuregulin 1 and, though quite well known, has not before been linked to schizophrenia.
Both the Virginia and the Decode teams worked by analyzing small runs of DNA known as markers along the genome, or total DNA, of their patients.
The August 2001 version, the latest analyzed, was a "real improvement," the Decode scientists say, but still contained 104 large-scale errors, according to their recombination map.
He believes the scientific reports he is about to publish will show the Decode experiment has succeeded in ways that others have not.
In a Nature commentary that accompanied the Decode study, Kondrashov raised the spectre of an inevitable "decline in the mean fitness of the population".
The relaying strategy is the decode and forward (DF) scheme.
The deCODE scientists, in contrast, had the benefit of evolving drafts from the human genome sequence.
