[Sci-tech-public] Revised: Victor McElheny talk on the Genome Nov. 1

[David Duran]

[Please note updated time and location]

 

Please join us November 1 for  a talk by our friend and colleague Victor
McElheny:

 

Genomic History: Open Items

         

DATE:           Monday, November 1

TIME:            4:00pm-6:00pm

ROOM:          E51-275




An abstract from Victor:

  Just finishing a survey of the history of the 20-year-old Human Genome
Project and its immediate results (Drawing the Map of Life, 

Basic Books, 2010) makes me acutely conscious of the large number of
unanswered or partly answered questions relating to this immense and still
unfolding aspect of contemporary biology. Several of these concern the
origins of what many thought was an improbable enterprise: 

 

1) the relative influence of technical advances, 2) discoveries of
gene-related diseases, 3) the political experience of the "War on 

Cancer" and the recombinant DNA controversy in the 1970s, 4) the difficulty
in measuring environmental sources of cancer, and 5) the 

desire to demonstrate the medical utility of molecular biology. Among other
open items: 1) the technologically conservative choice to use 

existing DNA sequencing technology for the big push to the first complete
human sequence; 2) detailed management of the global non-

profit human genome consortium, evidenced in multi-time-zone Friday
teleconferences of which extensive notes exist; 3) the technical 

evolution of the profusion of competing "next generation" sequencing
machines that are bringing the day of $1,000 human genomes very close; 4)
the influence of ethical concerns on the course of the project; and 5)
controversy over the relative role of rare or common variants in increasing
or decreasing an individual's risks of disease. All this points to the need,
in the fairly near future, of a comprehensive 

history of genomics, probably by multiple authors. Could this be ready by
the 25th anniversary of the project in 2015?

 

Speaker. Victor McElheny, a science journalist since 1957, was founding
director of STS' daughter program, the Knight Science 

Journalism Fellowships, from 1982 to 1998, when he became an STS Visiting
Scholar. Since then, he as published three books, Insisting 

on the Impossible, The Life of Edwin Land, Inventor of Instant Photography
(Perseus, 1998); Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific 

Revolution (Perseus 2003); and Drawing the Map of Life: Inside the Human
Genome Project (Basic Books, 2010). Earlier he was a staff 

reporter for the Charlotte (NC) Observer, Science magazine, the Boston
Globe, and the New York Times, covering such topics as science in 

Antarctica, the nuclear energy program of India, the Apollo lunar landing
program, and, starting in 1960, advances in biological 

science. In 1978-82, he was the first director of the Banbury Center of Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory.

 

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