The Adelphi Genetics Forum held its annual conference at the Royal Society in London.
The conference title was 'Progress and challenges implementing genomics into practice and society - the first 20 years'.
PET director Sarah Norcross was delighted to attend what promised to be a very interesting day.
October 2024 marks 20 years since the publication of the completed sequence of the Human Genome Project in Nature. This outstanding achievement gave rise to great hopes and an expectation that it would enable researchers conduct even more precise studies and discover how the genome influences health and disease. The conference offered an opportunity to learn about some of the achievements, the barriers and the failures since 2004.
The Adelphi Genetics Forum had put together an enticing line-up of speakers for the conference covering pharmaogenetics, cancer genetics, the mircobiome, epigenetics, social science and ethics.
Sarah Wynn, Chief Executive of the charity Unique, gave a powerful presentation on the impact on patients and families affected by rare conditions. While Emeritus Professor Andrew Read gave a very impressive summary of the before, during and after the Nature publication. This was quite some feat, and served as a great reminder of how so many things have changed. This presentation would have been particularly interesting for those in the audience who were too young to have been aware of these changes at the time.