BehindTheMedspeak: The 'Diseasome'

That's the term used to describe the figure above, a map linking different human diseases to the genes they have in common.

It accompanied Andrew Pollack's article in yesterday's New York Times Science section about the rapidly developing new field of medical computational genetics and informatics.

"For instance, two genes have recently been found to influence the risk of both diabetes and prostate cancer," wrote Pollack.

"I'm shaking my head with disbelief that two genes would pop up in these two diseases that have absolutely nothing in common," said Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the the National Human Genome Research Institute."