Technology always exceeds our imaginations
Welcome to This Genomic Life
Failing to imagine the consequences of the Human Genome Project
Back when the Human Genome Project was just getting underway, a significant number of biologists opposed it. They argued that the project arguing was too expensive, that current technology might not be up to the task, and that even if the project were to be completed, the data would be uninterpretable or useless. Today it’s easy to recognize the lack of imagination behind those criticisms. The Human Genome Project initiated a thorough transformation of the relationship between technology and the life sciences. While technology has always been important in biology, as in any science, the pace and scale of technological change over the last two decades is genuinely astonishing. We shouldn’t fault those early critics too much for not being able to see it.
We should draw an important lesson from one of those early criticisms of the Human Genome Project, because it illustrates the problem of thinking too narrowly about new technologies and the data they might generate. Some biologists thought that the data put out by the Human Genome Project would be largely useless because the knowledge and the computational tools to interpret it didn’t yet exist. On top of that, a large fraction of the genome likely had no function and thus it would offer no useful information. Critics who made this argument missed the point however, because they viewed the reference genome simply as a dataset to be interpreted, rather than what it turned out to be: a foundation for new analyses, new assays and experimental methods, and new technologies to measure biology at greater scale and higher resolution. Without the Human Genome Project, there would be no genome-wide association studies, no analyses of ancient DNA, no CRISPR-based gene therapies, no synthetic biology, and no recognition of the vast diversity of cell types and states that are now revealed by single-cell ‘omics.
Asking the right questions about new technologies
In this blog, we want to do our best to ask the right questions about new functional genomic technologies as they come online. Rather posing the narrow question of how we will interpret the data, we should instead ask what are all of the new things that we can do with this data. What new techniques and experiments can we do with spatial transcriptomics or single-cell sequencing or MPRAs that we couldn’t do before? And more broadly, how will these technologies change the practice of genetics, our approach to human health, and the broader perception about the place of genetics in their lives?
Here at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, we think a lot about new technologies: how to disseminate them, how to work them into scientific and clinical workflows, and how to build on them by developing new assays and analysis methods. We’re fortunate to be able to leverage institutional capabilities of the McDonnell Genome Institute, which was one of the big genome sequencing centers during the human genome project, and which continues develop and deploy the latest ‘omics technologies at the frontier of functional genomics. We think we have a useful vantage point from which to write about what’s happening in genomics and why it’s interesting.
What to expect from this blog
Like the public radio show that inspired our blog name, we aim to present interesting stories on big themes from a wide variety of perspectives. We’ll focus on stories around functional genomics — that is, multi-omics, machine learning, imaging, and their impact on science and human health. You can expect 2-3 posts per week that range from quick comments on new papers or news items, to deep dives on specific themes. About 20% of our stories will be about what’s going on at the McDonnell Genome Institute and Washington University, giving you an insider’s perspective on how we think about the field. But we’re not here to just talk about ourselves, and most of our posts will be about interesting developments in genomics from around the world. We hope you find them interesting as well.