Tag Archive for 'cheltenham science festival'

Responsible and effective use of personal genomes

08/06/2011
Categories: Uncategorized
Written by

This is the final of three posts from panellists in the Race to the $1000 Genome session today at the Cheltenham Science Festival – this time by Genomes Unzipped’s own Caroline Wright.

As the previous posts from Clive Brown and Adam Rutherford have indicated, there has long been enormous hype and hope surrounding the human genome project and the prospect of a $1000 genome. But what do these developments really mean for the general public? What do we need to know – either as individuals or as health care providers – before we can decide whether it’s worth having a genome sequenced?

Before starting to unpick some of the issues involved in the responsible and effective use of personal genome sequences, it’s worth reviewing how, where and why someone might actually have their genome sequenced. There are currently essentially three different and nonequivalent contexts in which an individual could have their genome sequenced:
Continue reading ‘Responsible and effective use of personal genomes’

Tags: , , , , .
3 Comments

Guest post by Adam Rutherford: Unknown unknowns and the human genome

07/06/2011
Categories: Guest Posts
Written by

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’

Tags: , , , , .
11 Comments

Guest post by Clive Brown: the disruptive power of cheap DNA sequencing

06/06/2011
Categories: Guest Posts
Written by

In advance of the Cheltenham Science Festival session on the race for the $1,000 genome this Wednesday, panel participant Clive Brown agreed to write a guest post on the importance of advances in genomic technology. Clive is Chief Technology Officer at Oxford Nanopore Technologies, where he leads the specification and design of the Company’s nanopore based sensing platform, including strand DNA/RNA sequencing and protein sensing applications, which we’ve written about previously here at Genomes Unzipped.

Incidentally, the other panel members will be Adam Rutherford, presenter of the excellent recent genetics documentary series The Gene Code, and Genomes Unzipped’s very own Caroline Wright, and the session will be chaired by Times Science Editor Mark Henderson – so if you’re anywhere near Cheltenham, you should definitely check it out.

When the final Human Genome Project publication was published in 2004, hundreds of scientists from 18 different institutions from the UK to the US, China and Japan authored the paper. The cost of this phenomenal collaborative project has been estimated at more than $3 billion from its initiation, a ‘moon-shot’ that was necessary to step onto the path of improving the process of obtaining and understanding genetic information. In 2004 the cost of sequencing a whole (haploid) human genome was still in the region of tens of millions of dollars. In 2008 this dropped through $1 million, in 2009 through $100k and in 2011 the cost is approaching $10k.

Many people have criticised the fact that the Human Genome Project did not in itself deliver a new era of personalised medicine, without realising that the project was just the first hurdle which facilitated major steps forward in the basic scientific understanding of genomics – for example, understanding the basic structure of the genome or mapping the variation between different peoples’ genomes. Importantly, the foundations were laid for understanding the very complex mechanisms behind how the genetic code relates to the expression of a protein and therefore the ‘phenotype’ – how those genetic differences are manifested whether it is a trait or disease-causing malfunction.
Continue reading ‘Guest post by Clive Brown: the disruptive power of cheap DNA sequencing’

Tags: , , , , .
4 Comments

Page optimized by WP Minify WordPress Plugin