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Every once in a while, an academic argument turns into a social-media spectacle. A collision over a seemingly innocuous subject — genes and the pursuit of happiness — has attracted a large number of onlookers.

In 2013, a paper concluded that a person's approach to happiness can shape gene expression (B. L.Fredrickson et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 110, 13684–13689; 2013 ). The study and its first author, psychologist Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, received much media attention at the time, but a new report by US and UK researchers claims that the findings were “artifacts of dubious analysis and erroneous methodology”. Stuart Ritchie, a human-intelligence researcher at the University of Edinburgh, UK, evidently enjoyed the show, as revealed by his tweet: “This demolition of a 'genetics of wellbeing' paper raised my wellbeing by a considerable amount. See go.nature.com/3ysfdp for more.