Thank you for your comments most of which are quite well understood in the GWAS community. I would gladly confess that I understated Poppers' conceptual framework of hypothesis-driven research for the sake of being a bit provocative. Indeed, several readers have pointed out that the idea of ‘always finding what you are looking for, by studying all data and discarding data only after assessing their relevance … ’ is a hypothesis per se. That is probably true, and then, after all, we are all doing hypothesis-based research.