Clinical Aspects of Genetic Research in Dentistry

¹ School of Dental and Oral Surgery, Columbia University, New York, New York

As pointed out in a recent paper on "Errors in Medical Studies,"³² it is important that we not "arrive at the correct answer to the wrong problem through faulty design, analysis, or technique."

Many factors contribute to measurable individual differences and a number of them may distort or interfere with the accurate determination and evaluation of intrapair variability in twins. If these difficulties are to be overcome, new approaches, methods, and techniques will be needed.

Although this is one of the basic problems that we face today in dental genetic research, it was recognized and concisely summarized in a classic statement made nearly one hundred years ago by Claude Bernard: "In biological science, the role of method is even more important than in other sciences, because of the immense complexity of the phenomena and the countless sources of error which complexity brings into experimentation."