6 - Plomin’s Predictions and the Human Genome Project

Summary

Robert Plomin, whose name has come up a few times already, is unquestionably the most important psychological geneticist of our time. Trained in social and personality psychology at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1970s (my graduate alma mater, though we didn’t overlap), he went on to faculty positions at the University of Colorado and the Pennsylvania State University (both major American centers for behavior genetics) before moving to London to take a position at the Institute of Psychiatry. Plomin’s career has embodied the integration of behavioral genetics into mainstream social science and psychology. Everywhere Plomin has been, he has initiated twin and adoption studies, many of which continue to make contributions today. Although genetics has always played a central role in Plomin’s research, you would never mistake his work for that of a biologist or quantitative geneticist: he (like me) has always been first and foremost a psychologist.