Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN) has interviewed Bruce Gelb, MD, President of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), ahead of the Society’s 2024 annual meeting November 5-9 in Denver, Colorado. The interview was conducted by GEN’s Deputy Editor-in-Chief Julianna LeMieux, PhD. Gelb is Director of the Center for Molecular Cardiology, and Professor of Pediatrics and Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. He will open the 2024 meeting on Tuesday afternoon with his Presidential Address that he said will focus on “incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity” and the role of “ascertainment bias.” This will be followed on Wednesday by the Presidential Symposium (“Mendelian Traits: Thinking about Complexity in the World of ‘Simple’ Genetics”) that will feature three Gelb-selected speakers who will build upon these themes.
“At the Presidential Symposium, I’ve invited three speakers who are going to touch on areas of this,” Gelb said. “One is a historian who also does philosophy of science. His name is Greg Raddick. He is originally from the United States, but he is at the University of Leeds in the UK. He has a book called Disputed Inheritance, which is about this intellectual debate that happened at the turn of the 20th century. So, in the early 1900s, there was an argument between William Bateson, who is a founder of genetics, and Raphael Weldon. They were arguing about complexity, which is what I’m interested in.”
“Second is a talk from somebody who’s quite involved with our Society, Athena Starland Davenport, who is on the faculty at the University of Tennessee. She’ll be talking about genetic modifiers of sickle cell disease. Everybody who has sickle cell disease is homozygous for the same allele, and yet the severity of sickle cell disease varies quite a lot from person to person. Understanding that is part of the complexity problem that I’m interested in.”
“And then the final speaker is a friend of mine from Princeton, Stanislav (Stas) Shvartsman. He does quantitative genomics on Drosophila and has been studying stochasticity in genetic changes—another contributor to the kind of variation that we see in patients.”
Gelb added to LeMieux that he is “confident that the use of AI to understand large genetic data sets will continue to be a theme at the meeting. Our data sets keep getting bigger and AI keeps getting better. Our data are very well set up to apply AI to, and there are clearly problems we need to solve. Two obvious examples: variants of unknown significance and what the heck all the non-coding variation is doing or not doing. Those are things that will be, I’m sure, emerging at the meeting as well.”
To read the entire GEN interview, please go here.