Integrated Genetic Epidemiology of Chagas Disease

MICHEL TIBAYRENC; JENNY TELLERIA; PATRICIO DIOSQUE; JUAN CARLOS DIB; CHRISTIAN BARNABE

Genetics and Evolution of Infectious Diseases

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Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2011; p. 1 - 749

Research and scholarship are characterized by a deep division between C.P. Snow’s two cultures, the humanities and the sciences. A colleague recently pointed out that within the sciences there is a division nearly as deep between, roughly,those whose language is mathematics and those whose language is organic chemistry. For much of the twentieth century, genetics and epidemiology spoke mathematics in the sense that there was faith that models, equations, and numbers would lead us to answers to our questions. In the latter part of the century, speakers of organic chemistry came to prevail as much of the focus was on DNA, its function, and the mechanics of sequencing. A great milestone was the completion of the human sequence along with subsequent surveys of genome-wide sequence diversity in humans and in other species. There was an implicit faith that with enough data we could simply look and find answers to our questions. This faith thus far has not been rewarded. We can download floods of genetic data from the Internet, but we cannot make much sense of it. It seems to be time for “speakers of mathematics” to again take a place in the discipline. Michel Tibayrenc has understood this very well for years, and he has been at the forefront of bringing the disciplines of ecology and evolutionary biology, genetics,infectious disease epidemiology, and immunology together to generate useful understandings of how to manipulate the relations between ourselves and our parasites. This volume brings together a diverse set of authors who share an appreciation of the complexities of context and history in the study of human disease.