The afternoon sessions at the Nobel Week Dialog covered a lot of ground, which was inevitable if you put six extremely smart people on the stage, give them a topic, and set them loose. Although there’s no way to possibly summarize the full conversation, it is possible to pull out some important themes that the…
Category Archives:
Medicine and Genetics
Gene-environment interactions was a hot topic during the first part of Stream A in the panel discussion on The Promised Land of Genomic Medicine: Where Can the Science Take Us? The moderator, Göran Hansson, posed the question: How far are we from understanding these interactions? Eric Lander raised a really interesting point that the general…
Eric Lander was one of the leaders of the effort to sequence the human genome, and has continued to work on various follow on projects through his involvement with the Broad Institute, a leading sequencing center. So, he makes an excellent choice to provide some perspective about how the growing availability of genomes has driven…
Asking for our “sympathy and support”, Eric Lander attemped to summarize the past and future of the genetic era. Since there are five turns of the double helix, he broke this down into five parts. The first of these was ‘The Secret of Life” which was the start of the 20th century until 1953 according to…
Leo Szilard – brilliant, peripatetic Hungarian physicist, habitué of hotel lobbies, soothsayer without peer – first grasped the implications of a nuclear chain reaction in 1933 while stepping off the curb at a traffic light in London. Szilard has many distinctions to his name; not only did he file a patent for the first nuclear…
There is a certain hot topic, when it comes to genetic testing and finding: The potential for genetic discrimination. The ideal person to give some answers on this is John Dupré, who focuses as a philosopher of science in genomics in society. Dupré will take part at two panel discussions at the Nobel Week Dialogue.…
I have been an active research scientist in bacterial genetics for over a decade, and a science blogger for about four years, with much of my research and writing focusing on various aspects of the lifestyles (and DNA) of bacteria. Yet in all the many hours I’ve devoted to staring at Gs, As, Ts and…
It is amazing to be invited to blog at the Nobel Week Dialogue this weekend. I have always been interested in science. As a young teenager I had an aviary and kept a detailed account of the bird’s family trees and feather colour, beginning my interest in inheritance and genetics! Fascination wasn’t the only driver behind my path…
The old Chinese saying exhorted us to live in “interesting times”. Since Darwin finished his great work in 1859, no other time has been as interesting for biology’s relevance to humanity as the current landscape in molecular biology and medicine. We like to think that the golden age of biology passed with the discovery of…
View all Swedish posts
Social Media
-
Check out the videos from Nobel Week Dialogue: http://t.co/Nkq3Lp9o #nwd12
-
Thank you @NobelWeekDialog for a great day of science #nwd12
-
Fantastic talk by Nowotny; adds context and framework for the day. #nwd12
