The opinions of experts play a role in science particularly when there are few hard data, and have been important in psychiatry. 50 The prominence of some historical candidate genes for schizophrenia has increased despite a lack of strong support from genetic studies (Figure 1). Thus, we also surveyed opinions on these genes. First, for 12 genes, we obtained ratings from informed investigators (i.e., those who introduced a candidate gene into the literature or who published extensively on it, Table 2). We point readers to the Supplement for further explanations from the informed investigators. The informed investigator ratings agreed with the PGC results for seven genes. For five genes (AKT1, CHRNA7, DISC1, DRD2, and HTR2A), the informed investigator rating was high (a rating ≥4 on a 1–5 scale). For one of these five (DRD2), the PGC results concur. For the remaining four genes, the informed investigator ratings ≥4 were different from empirical results.
