The Common Thread: What Genetics Tells Us About Ancestry, Health, and Personal Identity
This was the sixth in a series of Congressional Briefings that PGED was invited to organize on May 15, 2018 in cooperation with the offices of Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Bill Foster to engage policymakers on the importance of education and society-wide conversations about the promises and implications of genetics. For the first time, PGED held two programs back-to-back, one on the House of Representatives side of Congress, and the second one on the Senate side.
This briefing was focused on exploring how advances in genetics are producing new tools for investigating commonalities and differences across human populations, and their implications for precision medicine, racial identity, and beyond. Four expert scientists – Drs. Eimear Kenny, Charles Rotimi, Kerry Ressler and George Church – discussed how a person’s DNA, together with the environment, contributes to health, disease susceptibility, and response to medications. They also addressed misconceptions of genetic determinism, the profound impact of the environment (e.g., diet, living conditions, and life experiences), the history of eugenics, and the role of public awareness and dialog in the coming era of personal genetics and gene editing.
Information Brief Resource
In total, the two programs were attended by more than 100 staffers from Congressional offices, various government departments and agencies, academic and professional societies, and members of the public. Also in the audience were Rahwa Abraham-Tesfay (Stanford University), Tsion Tesfaye (Carnegie Mellon University), Drs. Dana Carroll (University of Utah), Mike Dougherty (University of Colorado), Susan Jenkins (Innovative Genomics Institute, University of California, Berkeley), Jenny Reardon (Science & Justice Research Center, University of California, Santa Cruz), Ronnie Stangler (University of Washington), Allison Werner-Lin (University of Pennsylvania), and Lea Witkowsky (Innovative Genomics Institute, University of California, Berkeley), who shared their expertise in genetics education and research, clinical practice, and the social sciences during the lively discussions throughout the briefing.
Our team created a resource to record the key information discussed during the session.
Panelists
Eimear Kenny, PhD – Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genome Science; Member of The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine; Member of The Center for Statistical Genetics; Member of The Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Charles Rotimi, PhD – Senior Investigator of the Metabolic, Cardiovascular and Inflammatory Disease Genomics Branch, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health
Kerry Ressler, MD, PhD – Chief Scientific Officer & James and Patricia Poitras Chair in Psychiatry, McLean Hospital; Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
George Church, PhD – Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School and MIT; Director of an NIH Center of Excellence in Genomic Science; Director of the Personal Genome Project
