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

[David Duran]

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



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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