In 2002, as a newly graduated Ph.D., I published a review article in Current Directions in Psychological Science with my graduate advisor Richard Rose, entitled “Behavior Genetics: What’s New? What’s Next?” (Dick & Rose, 2002). Twenty years later, when asked to provide an update on the field, I went back to that piece to reflect on how far we’ve come. Most of the research directions discussed in that paper have stood the test of time: Characterizing how genetic effects change across the lifespan (Dick et al., 2006) and interact with the environment (Assary et al., 2018) remain active areas of study, as is characterizing the extent to which genetic effects contribute to comorbidity across outcomes (Allegrini et al., 2020). We also forecast advances in gene identification, though it was here that our predictions fell short. We did not foresee the speed and scale at which gene discovery would advance and characterize the recent history of the field. The past decade has been witness to the formation of international consortia consisting of hundreds of scientists, scanning millions of genomes to collaboratively
