A Beautiful Life: High Risk–High Payoff in Genetic Science

Abstract

Portrait by Varvara Simonov n a aAnnu. Rev. Anim. Biosci. 2020.8:1-24. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by 50.80.253.90 on 03/16/20. For personal use only. AbstractThis narrative is a personal view of adventures in genetic science and society that have blessed my life and career across five decades. The advances I enjoyed and the lessons I learned derive from educational training, substantial collaboration, and growing up in the genomics age. I parse the stories into six research disciplines my students, fellows, and colleagues have entered and, in some cases, made an important difference. The first is comparative genetics, where evolutionary inference is applied to genome organization, from building gene maps in the 1970s to building whole genome sequences today. The second area tracks the progression of molecular evolutionary advances and applications to resolve the hierarchical relationship among living species in the silence of prehistory. The third endeavor outlines the birth and maturation of genetic studies and application to species conservation. The fourth theme discusses how emerging viruses studied in a genomic sense opened our eyes to host-pathogen interaction and interdependence. The fifth research emphasis outlines the population genetic-based search and discovery of human restriction genes that influence the epidemiological outcome of abrupt outbreaks, notably HIV-AIDS and several cancers. Finally, the last arena explored illustrates how genetic individualization in human and animals has improved forensic evidence in capital crimes. Each discipline has intuitive and technological overlaps, and each has benefitted from the contribution of genetic and genomic principles I learned so long ago from Drosophila. The journey continues.It's a very ancient saying but a true and honest thought, that if you become a teacher, by your pupils you'll be taught.-Oscar Hammerstein II, The King and I (1951) self-trained radio engineer. He began by building crystal radio sets in the late 1920s, and with but a high school diploma, he went on to build the CBS radio station and then the TV station in Rochester, where he became chief engineer. In my early youth, I paid little attention to science, being more interested in baseball, dogs, and rock and roll. My family relocated to Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington, DC, in 1958, where I had a rather undistinguished high school performance that, to be frank, would limit my college admission opportunities. One thing I did enjoy in that period was singing and dancing in amateur high school musicals. Looking back, I suspect that these on-stage appearances provided terrific preparation in building confidence for public speaking later in the science arena. After hitchhiking 12 miles each day to Good Counsel High School in Wheaton, Maryland, I was excited to enter St. Francis College, a small liberal arts Catholic school run by Franciscan friars in the hills of western Pennsylvania. St. Francis was good for me. It protected me from my adolescent instinc...