Formation | 1974 |
---|---|
Founder | Luigi Gedda |
Founded at | Rome, Italy |
Secretary General | Gonneke Willemsen |
President | Jennifer Harris |
Past President | Tim Spector |
Treasurer | Nicholas Martin |
The International Society for Twin Studies (ISTS) is an international, non-profit scientific organization. [1] The aim of the society is to advance research and knowledge in all fields of science related to twins and/or twin studies, for the benefit of both twins and their families as well as worldwide scientific communities. [2]
The International Congress on Twin Studies (ICTS) is a tri-ennial conference organised by the ISTS. Past locations include Budapest, Florence, Seoul, Ghent, Odense, London and others. [3]
Twin Research and Human Genetics is the official journal of the International Society for Twin Studies. [4]
The James Shields Award for Lifetime Contributions to Twin Research is an award created in 1980 in honor of James Shields, a pioneering researcher in human behavior genetics. [5] No award was given out between 1986 and 2001. Winners usually receive the award at the International Congress on Twin Studies or at the annual meeting of the Behavior Genetics Association. Past winners include Lindon Eaves, Peter Propping, Nick Martin, Dorret Boomsma, Nancy Segal, Matt McGue, Robert Plomin, John K. Hewitt and others. [6]
Twin studies are studies conducted on identical or fraternal twins. They aim to reveal the importance of environmental and genetic influences for traits, phenotypes, and disorders. Twin research is considered a key tool in behavioral genetics and in related fields, from biology to psychology. Twin studies are part of the broader methodology used in behavior genetics, which uses all data that are genetically informative – siblings studies, adoption studies, pedigree, etc. These studies have been used to track traits ranging from personal behavior to the presentation of severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.
Howard Robert Horvitz ForMemRS NAS AAA&S APS NAM is an American biologist best known for his research on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, whose "seminal discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death" were "important for medical research and have shed new light on the pathogenesis of many diseases".
Victor Almon McKusick was an American internist and medical geneticist, and Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. He was a proponent of the mapping of the human genome due to its use for studying congenital diseases. He is well known for his studies of the Amish. He was the original author and, until his death, remained chief editor of Mendelian Inheritance in Man (MIM) and its online counterpart Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM). He is widely known as the "father of medical genetics".
Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. is an American psychologist known for his behavioral genetics studies of twins raised apart. He is professor emeritus of psychology and director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research at the University of Minnesota. Bouchard received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966.
Oliver Smithies was a British-American geneticist and physical biochemist. He is known for introducing starch as a medium for gel electrophoresis in 1955, and for the discovery, simultaneously with Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans, of the technique of homologous recombination of transgenic DNA with genomic DNA, a much more reliable method of altering animal genomes than previously used, and the technique behind gene targeting and knockout mice. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007 for his genetics work.
Robert Joseph Plomin is an American/British psychologist and geneticist best known for his work in twin studies and behavior genetics. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology.
Irving Isadore Gottesman was an American professor of psychology who devoted most of his career to the study of the genetics of schizophrenia. He wrote 17 books and more than 290 other publications, mostly on schizophrenia and behavioral genetics, and created the first academic program on behavioral genetics in the United States. He won awards such as the Hofheimer Prize for Research, the highest award from the American Psychiatric Association for psychiatric research. Lastly, Gottesman was a professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota, where he received his Ph.D.
Dorret I. Boomsma is a Dutch biological psychologist specializing in genetics and twin studies.
Nicholas Gordon Martin is an Australian behavior geneticist who has published over 1300 peer-reviewed articles on topics including the heritability of religion and intelligence and medical disorders such as endometriosis. Martin is among the most cited medical scientists in the Southern Hemisphere, with a number of citation classics including "Genes, culture and personality: An empirical approach" that he co-authored with Lindon Eaves and Hans Eysenck, "Analysis of the p16 gene (CDKN2) as a candidate for the chromosome 9p melanoma susceptibility locus" (Nature, and "Genetic and environmental contributions to alcohol dependence risk in a national twin sample".
Twin Research and Human Genetics is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published bimonthly by the Cambridge University Press. It is the official journal of the International Society for Twin Studies (ISTS) and the Human Genetics Society of Australasia. The journal covers research on the biology and epidemiology of twinning as well as biomedical and behavioral twin- and molecular-genetic research. According to the Journal Citation Reports, it has a 2018 impact factor of 1.159. The journal was established in 1998 and has been edited by Robert Derom (1998–1999), and Nick Martin (2000–present). The title is a translation of Acta Geneticae Medicae et Gemellologiae, from 1952 until 1978 the official organ of the Permanent Committee for the International Congresses of Human Genetics and Società italiana di genetica medica, the original title of the first journal of the ISTS.
Behavioural genetics, also referred to as behaviour genetics, is a field of scientific research that uses genetic methods to investigate the nature and origins of individual differences in behaviour. While the name "behavioural genetics" connotes a focus on genetic influences, the field broadly investigates the extent to which genetic and environmental factors influence individual differences, and the development of research designs that can remove the confounding of genes and environment. Behavioural genetics was founded as a scientific discipline by Francis Galton in the late 19th century, only to be discredited through association with eugenics movements before and during World War II. In the latter half of the 20th century, the field saw renewed prominence with research on inheritance of behaviour and mental illness in humans, as well as research on genetically informative model organisms through selective breeding and crosses. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, technological advances in molecular genetics made it possible to measure and modify the genome directly. This led to major advances in model organism research and in human studies, leading to new scientific discoveries.
Wim E. Crusio is a Dutch behavioral neurogeneticist and a directeur de recherche with the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Talence, France.
The Behavior Genetics Association (BGA) is a learned society established in 1970 and which promotes research into the connections between heredity and behavior, both human and animal. Its members support education and training in behavior genetics; and publish Behavior Genetics, a journal on the topic.
Terrie Edith Moffitt is an American-British clinical psychologist who is best known for her pioneering research on the development of antisocial behavior and for her collaboration with colleague and partner Avshalom Caspi in research on gene-environment interactions in mental disorders.
Lindon J. Eaves (1944–2022) was a behavior geneticist and priest who published on topics as diverse as the heritability of religion and psychopathology. His research encompassed the development of mathematical models reflecting competing theories of the causes and familial transmission of human human differences, the design of studies for the resolution, analytical methods for parameter estimation and hypothesis-testing and application to substantive questions about specific (human) traits. He was the first to consider standardized variance components for heritability estimates and was the first to consider the effects of living with a relative on the behavior of a person. Furthermore, he was the first to think about genotype x age interaction and set up the algebra to study the effects of genes working in males as well as females, making it possible to use twins pairs of opposite-sex. Together with Nick Martin, he wrote many classic papers, one of which is "The genetic analysis of covariance structure". They also wrote the book, Genes, culture and personality: An empirical approach. In 2012, a Festschrift was held in Edinburgh dedicated to Eaves' work; the proceedings were subsequently published in Behavior Genetics.
John Keith Hewitt is a British-American behavioral geneticist and professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics. He was the Director of the Institute for Behavioral Genetics from 2000 - 2021. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1996.
Wendy Johnson is an American differential psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Edinburgh. She holds the chair in Differential Development in the Department of Psychology and Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh.
James Shields was a Scottish psychiatric geneticist and twin researcher. In the 1960s, he worked with Irving Gottesman on a twin study of schizophrenia at the Medical Research Council Psychiatric Genetics Unit at Maudsley Hospital in London, England. This study, known as the Maudsley twin study, is now considered a landmark in the field. He had previously begun working for Eliot Slater at Maudsley after serving in the United Kingdom's Royal Artillery during World War II. He was a fellow of the Eugenics Society and the International Society for Twin Studies. After Shields died in 1978, Gottesman founded the annual James Shields Award for Lifetime Contributions to Twin Research in his honor.
Ronald S. Wilson was an American clinical psychologist and behavioral geneticist. At the time of his death, he was a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Louisville and director of the Louisville Twin Study, as well as president of the Behavior Genetics Association. He joined the faculty of the University of Louisville School of Medicine in 1965 and became director of the Louisville Twin Study there in 1967; he held both positions from then until his death. Originally an associate professor at the University of Louisville, he was promoted to the rank of full professor there in 1971. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Psychological Association, as well as a member of the Society for the Study of Human Biology and a founding fellow of the International Society for Twin Studies, of which he served as vice president from 1980 to 1983. In 1979, he received the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Socio-Psychological Prize, and in 1980, he received the James Shields Award from the International Society for Twin Studies. He was elected president-elect of the Behavior Genetics Association in 1984. He died of a heart attack while playing tennis on November 16, 1986.