I have taken the liberty of inviting Francis Collins to join our discussion
list to allow us to ask him questions about genetics, the human genome, and
the like. He has agreed to sign on Sunday, March 24th and stay on "for a
week."
This comes from his biography: "Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., is a
physician-geneticist and the Director of the National Human Genome Research
Institute, NIH. In that role he oversees a fifteen year project aimed at
mapping and sequencing all of the human DNA by the year 2005. Many consider
this the most important scientific undertaking of our time.
Collins was raised on a small farm in Virginia and home-schooled until the
sixth grade. He obtained his undergraduate degree in chemistry at the
University of Virginia, and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in physical chemistry
at Yale University. Recognizing that a revolution was beginning in
molecular biology and genetics, he changed fields and enrolled in medical
school at the University of North Carolina, where he encountered the field
of medical genetics and knew he had found his dream. After a residency and
chief residency in internal medicine in Chapel Hill, he returned to Yale
for a fellowship in human genetics, where he worked on methods of crossing
large stretches of DNA to identify disease genes. He continued to develop
these ideas after joining the faculty at the University of Michigan in
1984. This approach, for which he later coined the term positional cloning,
has developed into a powerful component of modern molecular genetics, as it
allows the identification of disease genes for almost any condition,
without knowing ahead of time what the functional abnormality might be."
Francis Collins has been an ASA member for twenty years. He is also on the
ASA advisory council and is scheduled to speak at the annual meeting this
year at Pepperdine University. (He also mentioned for those who live in
the Washington DC area he is giving a talk as part of the C.S. Lewis
Institute Wednesday Lecture series, entitled "Can a Geneticist be a
Christian?" This will be on Wednesday April 3 at 7:30 PM at McLean
(Virginia) Presbyterian Church.)
This online discussion could be an excellent outreach opportunity for
us. Those who are in Academics might invite your students to join the
discussion list for this period. I would suggest the subject to be:
"Francis Collins Online" for that time period, and I think we should avoid
spinning off threads with various confusing titles so that our guest will
know what is intended for him and what is just typical ASA traffic.
This should be fun and give us a good opportunity to spread the word about ASA.
Now, please, go and spread the word.
Dick Fischer - The Origins Solution - www.orisol.com
"The answer we should have known about 150 years ago"
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