This has been going on for decades, it's called GWAS [1] and it has had a few successes but basically hasn't worked as well as everyone hoped it would in the 90s. The reason it doesn't work that well is that the human genome has ~3 billion letters and human physiology is complex. So trying to establish stastitically significant correlations between genome variations and human physiology is hard and requires more than Excel. In fact, the computational tools that have been applied to this are incredibly sophisticated and are not the limiting factor. The limiting factor is that you probably need millions or billions of genomes to make it work, and we don't have that yet. Also people are beginning to realize that many disease-relevant traits are caused by rare variants (rather than obvious statistically significant correlations) which are quite hard to detect this way.
So... anyway you're right that this is a natural way to approach the question of understanding the genetic basis of disease and physiology. But it's been beaten to death and found to drive fewer insights than were hoped
Lasso (L2 regularised) regression was actually invented to solve these kinds of problems. To the best of my knowledge, this has not yet appeared in Excel.
I think this case blew-up because the Saudi's were caught red-handed. Erdowan realized he could put extreme pressure on the Saudi's because his evidence was so strong. I think you're probably right that this sort of thing happens with some frequency, but you can only call foul if you have hard evidence which is much more rare.
it was a handful of factors: erdogan having strong evidence like you said and leaking it slowly to maximize impact, the fact that it was a journalist meaning journalists paid a great deal of attention to it, the fact that the details were almost like fiction, and the many people opposed to the atrocities in yemen/general opponents of the saudi regime using it as a convenient lever against mbs. there are probably a few more notable ones but those are the main currents as i see it.
How could they not-even mention which gene is mutated? I'm a biologist and it was the only piece of info I wanted. The video even asks if you know anyone with this gene mutation, but doesn't say what the mutation is.
