2012 National DNA Day Online Chatroom Transcript
This is just one question from an archive of the National DNA Day Moderated Chat held in April 2012. The NHGRI Director and many genomics experts from across NHGRI took questions from students, teachers and the general public on topics ranging from basic genomic research, to the genetic basis of disease, to ethical questions about genetic privacy.
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why did you decide to work on the field of genetics
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Eric Green, M.D., Ph.D.:
I am the Director of NHGRI, a position I've held since late 2009. NHGRI is the largest organization in the world solely dedicated to genomics research.? Previously, I was the NHGRI Scientific Director, Chief of the NHGRI Genome Technology Branch, and Director of the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center.? Since the early 1990s, I have been extensively involved in efforts to map, sequence, and understand eukaryotic genomes. My work included significant, start-to-finish involvement in the Human Genome Project, and more recently focused on utilizing large-scale DNA sequencing to address important problems in genomics, genetics, and biomedicine.
I am clinically trained as a pathologist, and pathologists think broadly about a wide spectrum of diseases and about all tissues and organs. I became interested in genetics and genomics because of the 'central' role that DNA (our genome) plays in health and disease. |
| Palms Middle School in CA (7th grade student) |
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