Professor Sandy Raeburn was formerly a Volunteer Writer at BioNews.
The Born in Bradford study, which began in 2007, has recorded data prospectively from 12,000 mothers, 4000 fathers and their 14,000 children born in Bradford General Hospital...
About forty years ago meetings of the London Dysmorphology Club were held at Great Ormond Street Hospital. This club set out to document the clinical features of childhood congenital disorders and to give as precise a label as possible to the underlying conditions, most of which were extremely rare....
Over 30 years ago, those who taught clinical genetics to medical students and other health professionals focussed on the triple difficulty of explaining a genetic disease, its inheritance pattern and its scientific basis. Now, there is a growing literature of personal memoirs, wonderfully exemplified by this splendid monograph...
Having worked with families affected by genetic disorders for more than 40 years, both in the UK (with its multi-faith society) and in the Sultanate of Oman (where the majority are Muslim but other religions are allowed), I have seen and looked after many people with hereditary illnesses, including those with disabling mitochondrial conditions....
During the early, uncertain years of the Human Genome Project, Professor Bryan Clarke of the University of Nottingham kept challenging all Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) aficionados to explain how the new biological knowledge obtained would lead to medical advances. Bryan also kept asking - 'whose genome is being sequenced anyway'?...
About 15 years ago, I formed the view we should be less ambitious about improving 'Public Understanding of Science' because we should not expect the public to understand genetic principles in detail. Better, I thought, to give a grounding in core science skills...
This Frontiers programme challenged three genetic dogmas. The presenter quoted a recent Observer headline on epigenetics: 'Why everything we were told about evolution was wrong!'...
Forty years ago I began to realise that the most interesting work in medicine lay at the interface of different specialties. Researchers who straddle such boundaries gain important insights but the experience can be daunting...
First, here is the bad news. Readers attracted by this title are in for a stormy and depressing journey. The writing, both in choice of language and sentence construction, is turgid. The problems of 'plain English' start in the six-page introduction, reach a low point in the ethical chapter and only improve slightly in the legal section...
Nearly twenty years ago, a medical school I know well was deciding whether to incorporate the university genetics department. One senior medical professor cautioned that science-focused geneticists would be well advised to stop studying fruit flies, snails and other animal species in favour of 'real genetic research' into human genetics....
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