Event Review: The Population Laboratory

It is not often that you get the
chance attend a seminar organised by an institution that is still under
construction. Due to open in 2015, the building
that will house the Francis Crick Institute currently comprises a rudimentary basement and ground floor, a handful of
towering cranes and a swanky visitor centre showing what the building will end
up looking like (a true lover's lane, if the virtual couples strolling through
the mock-up atrium are anything to go by).

Nonetheless, the Crick - a consortium
of six of the UK's leading scientific and academic organisations - has been out
there since construction started last year in an effort to establish its name.
It sponsors a youth football team, reaches out to local schools, and organises
a range of seminars to engage the scientists that will eventually populate the institute.

As the Crick advertises itself as Europe's
biggest biomedical institute to-be, I was a bit doubtful whether public health
researchers and epidemiologists like me could find a new home there. The word
'biomedical' tends to imply labs-only, and as I only need a computer to run my
models, you can put me in any old office (like my current windowless
overcrowded grad student office).

However, the Crick is set to be an
interdisciplinary institute, and luckily for me, number crunchers and model maniacs
are to be included. The Population Laboratory (we couldn't completely get away
from the lab bench image) set out to bring together participants from
universities and funders to explore innovative areas of research that might
find a home at the new institute.

It is an ambitious goal, seeing as the
Crick is still three years away from opening, but by attracting speakers like
Cancer Research UK's chief executive Dr Harpal Kumar, you really start to
believe something very special is about to grow in London.

Dr Kumar emphasises that the basic
sciences are still insufficient in bringing about the step changes we expected
to see after projects like the Human Genome Project. Population science can
help to identify new questions, and together, they are 'science on a scale we
haven't seen before', he said.

As Dr Kumar and several population scientists
from University College London point out, there is a wealth of data available,
especially in genetics. With projects like ENCODE, UK Biobank and the prospect of affordable
whole genome sequencing this multitude of data and data
sources is only set to increase. Meanwhile, people who can work with
complicated genetic data and, more importantly, interpret it are scarce.

Perhaps I am a bit biased towards the
Crick - the potential of a fashionable new office is a strong lure - but with
seminars like this I really start to believe in its potential.