INVITED AND SPECIAL SESSIONS
Wednesday, October 26
3:30 PM-4:30 PM
SESSION 11 - Peter Gruber Foundation Prize in Genetics
Hall E
A gold medal and a $200,000 prize will be presented to Robert H. Waterston, MD., Ph.D., University of Washington, Seattle. The prize is awarded annually to a leading scientist or group of scientists working in genetics, in recognition of groundbreaking contributions and fundamental insights in the field of genetics research. These may include original discoveries in genomic organization, function, regulation, variation, and transmission.
The Human Genome Revolution
The Human Genome Project (HGP) is revolutionizing biomedical research and has the potential to do the same to health care. Its history has been extensively described, but some less publicized parts deserve highlighting. These include the early origins of genomics, the roots of the Bermuda rules governing data release, and the role of the BAC map in organizing the project and in framing the results.
With the success of the HGP and the genomes of humans and the major model organisms now in hand, the challenge shifts to understanding the contents of the human genome, both for its inherent interest and its importance for human health. Model organisms can reveal the common pathways and networks and their integration to produce an animal. Our own work with C. elegans development hints at the potential. At another level, comparative sequence analysis will reveal much of the functional sequence in the genome and how it has changed in the human lineage. But ultimately, a comprehensive understanding of human variation and its consequence on phenotype will provide the greatest insight. Technical advances are on the horizon that will cheaply provide individual genome sequences, but improvements in describing the human phenotype and means of overcoming the ethical issues must accompany the technical advances for the revolution to fulfill its promise.
Robert H. Waterston, M.D., Ph.D., is the William H. Gates III Endowed Chair in Biomedical Sciences and Chair of the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. Through his leadership in his previous position at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Waterston brought whole-genome sequencing of metazoan organisms to reality and pioneered the genetic analysis of muscle. In collaboration with the Sanger Centre, he constructed a physical map and obtained the complete sequence of the first animal genome, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. He has been a central figure in the large-scale DNA sequencing and analysis of the human, mouse, chimp and other genomes and in the effort to use the latter to aid in the interpretation of the human sequence. He also pioneered the use of the Internet for the rapid release of sequence and map information. He is now pursuing new methods of understanding how the information stored in the genome is interpreted to enable life.
