Puns aside, today has certainly been a “big” day in human genetics. Following the initial discovery of isolated human genetic variants that affect height, several new reports in Nature Genetics isolate as many as twenty common loci that may provide yet another explaination why your child will never get into Harvard, or make enough to pay for your retirement. In the midst of culling through the finding, however, the Pasigraph noted an interesting geopolitical aside in some data: glory be, even PhD trained Europeans still love America, and would dock their boats at the ledge of the Statue of Liberty in a heartbeat.
While seeking out Hipster-worthy dubs to describe their findings, a consortia based in the stuffy UK has relented to calling one particular vantage point of common variant studies “The Manhattan Plot“. So either it’s hard to remember any islands in Europe which are longer than they are tall, or Euros still yearn to conduct their useless science in a place where costs woefully outstrip the puny remittance they receive to decipher the genes responsible for Shaquille O’Neal.
The Pasigraph notes this isn’t the first time we’ve seen city-envy creep into scientific forums…we diligently referred to the last metastasis we had as “going Uptown“.
