In the diagnostic laboratory, he translates the findings of genetic discoveries into tests that can be used to identify people's risks for disease prior to occurrence, or for predicting its outcome once it has occurred.
[2] Ostrer graduated in 1972 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked as an undergraduate student under Salvador Luria, studying the effects of the bactericidal agent Colicin K. He received his M.D.
[4] Oster has stressed that his work is not intended to create a hierarchy in human society or support eugenic aims, and he seeks to understand genetic differences without promoting discrimination.
[citation needed] While working at the Khao-I-Dang Holding Center in Thailand in 1981, he recruited Thai and Khmer subjects for a study of the shared origin of the Hemoglobin E mutation.
At NYU, members of his laboratory showed that genetic variants in the X-cone opsin caused color vision deficiencies by altering spectral tuning, transport, and stability of the encoded visual pigment proteins.
[14][15][16] In a 2020 article in Avotaynu, Ostrer responded by saying that Elhaik:[17] "was criticized for sampling only a small number of Ashkenazi Jews, for assuming that Armenians and Georgians would be proxies for Khazars, and for accepting the Khazarian hypothesis as fact...
... A team of investigators led by Pavel Flegontov and Alexei Kassian pointed out that Elhaik misapplied the GPS technique because it is intended for inferring a geographic region where a modern, unadmixed population is likely to have arisen.
"Geneticist Sarah Tishkoff said that Ostrer's work along with Doron Behar's study "clearly show a genetic common ancestry" to the majority of Jewish populations.