Tag Archive for 'adam rutherford'

This is the second of three guest posts from panellists in the Race to the $1000 Genome session tomorrow at the Cheltenham Science Festival. Yesterday we heard from Oxford Nanopore‘s Clive Brown about the disruptive effects of genomic technology; today’s instalment is from science broadcaster Adam Rutherford, presenter of the recent BBC series about the genome, The Gene Code. Tomorrow we’ll hear from Genomes Unzipped’s own Caroline Wright.

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. —Donald Rumsfeld.

The expectations of the Human Genome Project were Rumsfeldian. This much-mocked statement that the then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made in response to the continued absence of evidence for weapons of mass destruction was made almost exactly a year after the publication of the first results of the Human Genome Project (HGP). His oddly profound cod-philosophy resonates with that grand endeavour. The announcement, initially in June 2000, and the publication, were met with triumphalism in the media, fanned by our and its glorious leaders. President Clinton stood on a platform, flanked by Craig Venter and Francis Collins at the White House, and declared that:

Without a doubt this is the most important most wondrous map produced by human kind…

Today we are learning the language in which God created life.

Whatever your religious disposition, that is a bold statement. He and others went on to speculate that soon we would understand and be on the path to curing many, if not all, diseases. Geneticists bristled at this hubris. The fundamental problem was unknown unknowns. It turned out that humans have far fewer genes than we expected. The vast majority of the genome does not contain genes. So what is it doing?
Continue reading ‘Guest post by Adam Rutherford: Unknown unknowns and the human genome’