IN SEARCH OF HUMAN VARIATION

There is widespread interest in documenting the amount and geographic distribution of genetic variation in the human species. This informati on is desired by the biomedical community, who want a densely packed m ap of SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) sites to be used to identif y genes associated with disease by linkage disequilibrium between sets of adjacent markers and the occurence of disease in populations, and to characterize disease-related variation among populations. Anthropol ogists use genetic variation to reconstruct our species' history, and to understand the role of culture and geography in the global distribu tion of human variation. The requirements for these two perspectives s eem to be converging on a need for an accessible, representative DNA b ank and statistical database of human variation. However, both Fields have been using conceptual models that are oversimplified, and this ma y lead to unrealistic expectations of the questions that can be answer ed from genetic data.