Friends Closer Than Family? In Reality, They Very Well Could Be
Have some really good friends? You may be closer to them than you think. A new study has found that we may share genes with our friends. A genome-wide analysis has shown that we share some genetic similarities with our friends, according to newswise.com. A study from the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University finds that friends who are not biologically related still resemble each other genetically. Hmm. I wonder how good a friend you have to be? Anyway. . . "We have more DNA in common with the people we pick as friends than we do with strangers in the same population," the Web site quotes study coauthor James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at UC San Diego. The study is a genome-wide analysis of nearly 1.5 million markers of gene variation, and relies on data from the Framingham Heart Study. The researchers focused on 1,932 unique subjects and compared pairs of unrelated friends against pairs of un...