This is a well written article that does a great job explaining SNPs and haplotypes and all, but perpetuates a common inaccuracy in the very first lines.

Watson is not a "co-discoverer of DNA". Watson and Crick presented the first accurate model for the structure of DNA. This was an incredibly important contribution. I don't say this to take any credit from Watson, despite the insane and idiotic nature of the things that have lately come out of his mouth. I'm just making a correction to the article.

If anyone discovered DNA, it was Friedrich Miescher in 1869, almost one hundred years before Watson and Crick's groundbreaking paper. The significance of DNA was not appreciated for quite some time, but the narrative is one that I hope any student of molecular biology could accurately recount. The experiments that proved that DNA is the material basis of heredity were performed by several groups that did not include Watson or Crick and preceded their paper on the structure by several years.

So while Watson and Crick's work easily represents one of the most fundamentally important contributions to biology ever, they did not "discover" DNA.

By the way, I just checked wiki, which gets the history of DNA research right. It's not exactly obscure information.

Agreed--I fail to see how Slate's science/technology coverage can claim to be credible when it is so frequently riddled with errors like this.

I hadn't even read the article--there are at least two more errors/misunderstandings:

In most cases, SNPs fall in the vast stretches of DNA that do not code for traits, though some are associated with physical appearance.

What do they mean "code for traits?" SNPs can fall in a noncoding region, meaning that they're not translated into protein, but they can still underlie a trait if they contribute to that gene's regulation, as many of them do.

Researchers have identified more than 3 million SNPs, often arranged in groups (known as "haplotypes") of those that happen to be close to one another in the genome sequence.

This is a little more nitpicky, but they don't "happen to be" close to each other; they're close to each other for a reason, because adjacent SNPs are less likely to be split up when recombination events occur. I don't think the author of this article understands what a haplotype is.

This is a bad week for Slate's science reporting. They ask outside people for advice preparing these articles--maybe they should ask those people to vet the finished articles too.