The Synapse Connections of a lifetime

So some researchers have nothing better to do.. so they decided to pick up a few harry potter books and came out with a study called: "Origins of magic: review of genetic and epigenetic effects".

It's weird.. haha! Everything is done so professionally that you woould think it's a real study.. Hang on.. it is a real study.. check this out:

Abstract

Objective To assess the evidence for a genetic basis to magic.

Design Literature review.

Setting Harry Potter novels of J K Rowling.

Participants Muggles, witches, wizards, and squibs.

Interventions Limited.

Main outcome measures Family and twin studies, magical ability, and
specific magical skills.

Results Magic shows strong evidence of heritability, with familial
aggregation and concordance in twins. Evidence suggests magical ability to be a
quantitative trait. Specific magical skills, notably being able to speak to
snakes, predict the future, and change hair colour, all seem heritable.

Conclusions A multilocus model with a dominant gene for magic might exist,
controlled epistatically by one or more loci, possibly recessive in nature.
Magical enhancers regulating gene expressionmay be involved, combined with
mutations at specific genes implicated in speech and hair colour such as FOXP2
and MCR1.

The even quoted a twin study from the book..

Twin studies: Although assumptions are made, complete genetic determination
of a disease would result in monozygotic twins being concordant.12 The two
pairs of twins in the Harry Potter books, the Patil and Weasley twins, are
monozygotic and both have magical abilities. Although two sets of twins is a
small sample size, the finding does add credence to the idea of magic being a
genetically determined trait.

This is weird. Certainly not something I expect to see from BMJ :P

References:

Ramagopalan et. al. (December 2007). Origins of magic: review of genetic and epigenetic effects. BMJ 2007;335:1299-1301. Retrieved December 22 2007 from http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7633/1299