Printed in U.S.A. DOI: 10.1093/aje/kwg152 Lee Responds to “Testing for Hardy-Weinberg Disequilibrium”

I appreciate Weinberg and Morris ’ thoughtful commen-tary (1) on my paper (2). In their article, they put my work under the perspective of gene mapping in the postgenomic era. I share the same view with them that the method proposed in my paper amounts to a tree-shaking approach to harvesting the high-hanging fruit (a low-cost approach to generating hypotheses aimed at localizing disease-susceptibility genes for complex human diseases). However, some issues raised by Weinberg and Morris (1) deserve scrutiny. These are 1) the power of the Hardy-Weinberg disequilibrium test (HWT) when a single-nucle-otide polymorphism is a “marker ” but is not a disease-susceptibility “gene ” itself; 2) the utility of the proposed method as a gene-localization tool; and 3) the false alarm due to unmeasured ethnicity