The Stanley Medical Research Institute, a Maryland-based philanthropy, is donating $100 million to uncover the genes important in mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, according to an article in today’s Boston Globe.

The money is going to the Broad Institute, led by genome bigwig Eric Lander, who was one of the driving forces behind the cancer genome. I’ve already noted the criticisms against that project, and some of the same apply here. Sure, technology now allows us to find the genetic variations between different people and the researchers will no doubt find masses of data.

But these are extremely complex disorders, each involving multiple genes. What roles do those genes play in the disease? Without understanding how the different genes interact and what the impact is of the different variations, the data will be all but meaningless. For example, scientists from the cancer genome project are reporting in this week’s Nature that the number of mutations that drive cancer is much larger than they expected.

To the institute’s credit, the mental illness project’s results will be publicly available — the more scientists who can analyze the data the better. Lander is quoted in the Globe as saying, “If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, and you can sift the whole haystack, you’ll find the needle.”

Hmmm…. I don’t think that was the message of the idiom.