New Horizons in Science

State, a psychiatrist who went back to school to study genomics, has become one of a group of elite researchers using the newest and fastest genomics analysis—so-called high-throughput technology—to pursue the genes behind Tourette syndrome, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other neuropsychiatric ailments in children, which have clear genetic components but which have proven elusive and difficult to study. The problem has often been that genes that seem linked to these disorders in one family have no apparent connection to the ailment in other families. In May, State reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that he and his colleagues had discovered a rare mutation in a gene in a family with Tourette syndrome—a finding that immediately suggested a possible treatment. State will give us the latest findings on several similar studies now under way.