Genetics and health care

Scientists from the Peninsula Medical School, Exeter, and the University of Oxford first identified a genetic link to obesity through a genome-wide study of 2,000 people with type 2 diabetes and 3,000 controls. The study found that people carrying one copy of the FTO allele have a 30 per cent increased risk of being obese compared to a person with no copies. "This is an exciting piece of work that illustrates why it was so important to sequence the human genome," says Dr Walport. "Obesity is one of the most challenging problems for public health in the UK. The discovery of a gene that influences the development of obesity in the general population provides a new tool for understanding how some people appear to gain weight more easily than others.