There is another problem in our field: the profound lack of representation in genetics, both among our participants and among the researchers who are driving the research agenda. Nearly 80% of all gene identification studies are conducted with individuals of European descent (Popejoy & Fullerton, 2016). This is problematic because our genetic predictions are most accurate for individuals whose genetic background matches the research participants used to identify relevant genetic variants (Martin et al., 2017). There are many reasons for this (Lewis & Vassos, 2020; Peterson et al., 2019), but central among them is a basic property of our DNA in which “background” genetic variation is a product of the ancestral history of the migration of people around the world. When we detect associated variants, often we are picking up on nearby correlated variants, rather than causal variants, which will necessarily be connected to an individual’s ancestral background. Differences in social processes and gene environment interaction across different groups also likely impacts the portability of genetic scores.
