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Based at The University of Edinburgh, the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum is part of the ESRC Genomics Network and pioneers new ways to promote and communicate social research on the contemporary life sciences.

Thursday 26 May 2011

What I’m Doing 2

While I’m reading and researching for these possible events... these “Encounters with the Genome” as it were…and thrashing out what’s the best way to present and market such things…and thinking about the play, I’ll also be posting on what I’m finding out about as I go.

And although right now I’m swimming about in all this like a stray protein in a Petrie dish, there are a couple of things I hope to be able to do when I can occasionally attach myself to whatever it is stray proteins might attach themselves to.

For one thing, sometime soon I’ll be inviting submission to a website called “The Human Genre Project”…a snazzy online collection of poems and stories and jokes inspired and collected on a neat wee cartoon of the 23 chromosomes shared by you and me. Check it out at www.humangenreproject.com

Another thing I can do is recommend reading…if I come across something I find useful and/or exciting, I can say why and pass it on.

One I can immediately and whole heartedly recommend is Sean Carroll’s “Endless Forms Most Beautiful”, its title deriving, as I’m sure you recognize, from Darwin’s uncharacteristic flight of prosody at the tail end of “Origin of Species”.

What Carroll does is elegantly and rather movingly to demonstrate the key shift in perspective between “classical” genetics and “genomics” when it comes to thinking about animal evolution…

(No, I wasn’t aware there was one either…not till last week anyway)

That is, to stop thinking quite so much about what goes wrong with bodies and where to find the “gene for it”…the smoking gun…

And to use the holistic viewpoint of the whole genome to look at the structures of what goes so miraculously, improbably RIGHT…

Most of the time.

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