In 2014, Stefansson is reported to have astonished David Altshuler, then deputy director of the Broad Institute, who stopped by at deCODE on his way back from Finland and Sweden. Altshuler had been leading a T2D research effort and had found a rare variant in that seemed to protect even those with all the common lifestyle risk factors from developing the disease. Stefansson called one of his group leaders and asked him to test the look for an association in deCODE's data. Within a few minutes they had confirmed that the Icelanders didn't have the exact variant found by Altshuler's team but did have another in the same gene that was clearly protective for T2D.   The deCODE team then added their variant to the paper that was published in Nature Genetics.