Welcome to GWAS stories

GWAS Stories’ origin dates back to the time when X was Twitter. During my PhD and postdoctoral years, I began tweeting regularly about the papers I read day to day. These were mostly short commentaries, highlighting a finding or a minor detail (sometimes even a line in the background section of the paper) that I spotted and found interesting. At times, I also wrote my honest opinions about media-hyped papers, explaining why something was not as groundbreaking as it was claimed to be. Over time, I noticed that people enjoyed my posts and that my thoughts resonated with many. I gathered a decent following over the years, enriched for students and academic scientists, and more recently quite a lot of people from the biotech side as well. That encouragement is what eventually got me writing here.

Writing on Substack turned out to be different from writing on X. I spend more time writing an article here than I do on a short X post. Working through a paper or a topic over many days gives me a much deeper understanding than a quick commentary on X could. So over time I’ve started spending relatively more of my time creating fewer, fuller pieces, and lately long-form articles as well.

Most of what I write here are paper deep dives. I walk through a paper from its background to the results, focussing on the findings that I find interesting. I explain why something is important, particularly from a translational perspective. Now and then I follow a single drug program from start to finish, or take a topic and trace it through a series of papers over the years. I also plan to bring back the yearly roundups I used to write. Almost everything I write connects to human genetics in some way, though occasionally I stray into clinical trials, clinical case series, epidemiology, molecular biology and other omics.

Long-term readers appreciate the value that regularly following GWAS Stories brings. You will often hear about a finding here first. I take time to curate the most interesting papers, giving you a sense of being on top of the latest advancements in the field, which would otherwise be difficult for you to find on your own with your busy schedule. You get the main findings and why they matter without having to read through an entire paper. I also give special attention to the background, highlighting earlier work upon which a new finding stands, which is something readers have appreciated a lot.

Most of my readers are geneticists, many of them in academia. But interestingly, the feedback I received often came from people in other fields, such as clinicians, neuroscientists and molecular biologists. Drug hunters, biotech investors, students and curious non-scientists read GWAS Stories as well.

I usually work on a regular post and a long-form piece side by side. You can expect a regular post once every two to three weeks, and a long-form article once every two to three months. Please also check GWAS Signals, the sister publication to GWAS Stories, where a curated list of papers with AI-assisted summaries goes out on a weekly basis. Both GWAS Stories and GWAS Signals will always be free. I plan to open the option of a paid subscription for anyone who wants to support the work, but nothing will ever sit behind a paywall.

I am Veera Rajagopal, a physician-scientist. I trained in medicine first, then did my PhD and postdoctoral research in psychiatric and behavioural genetics. After that I worked in industry in a translational genetics group focussed on neurology, addiction, ophthalmology and auditory therapeutic areas. My medical training shapes how I read a paper: I look at the disease, its treatment and its biology the way a clinician would. Though my own research has centred on the brain, my interests span the whole of medicine.

Finally, a thank-you. To everyone who has followed along over the years, trusted my opinions, and told me that something I wrote made a difference to their own work: you are the reason GWAS Stories continues to exist. If any of you would like to get in touch, reply to any post, send me a DM on X or write to veera [dot] scientist [at] gmail [dot] com. You can also find me on LinkedIn.

—Veera