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Interesting that the gene "discovery" is really just making an association. The gene itself was discovered a long time ago (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC556810/), and associated with other negative outcomes.

Like many that are involved in diseases, the gene appears to be activated in response to DNA damage.

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Yep, that's what pretty much all genomic discoveries are these days. Since the Human Genome Project [1], which set out to map all genes in the human genome, was considered complete in 2003, most studies these days seek to find the correlations between genetic mutations and diseases.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project

it's kind of amazing that woese managed to discover a whole kingdom of life with just a few RNAs and the best we can do with thousands of genomes is make weak associations.

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