At the same time, it must be remembered that the worldwide human population and its distribution of disease-risk variation represent the singular outcome of an evolutionary experiment, and that large portions of this experiment continue to remain untapped for their potential to contribute to the modern enterprise of human genetics. Each new genetic resource expands the consideration of human diversity, but necessarily provides an incomplete picture of its full extent. Thus, many opportunities exist for identifying new aspects of genetic variation to examine for future resources, as well as for creative application of worldwide populations in risk-variant discovery, characterization of known variants, and the population-genetic modeling and statistical designs that will facilitate these efforts. As technological barriers to the production of genomic data continue to fall, it can be hoped that the community will accept the challenge of capitalizing on the full range of human diversity for the next wave of investigations of the variants that underlie human genetic disease.
