Message from the Director
The IGSP Looks Ahead
Huntington F. Willard, PhD
As the calendar turns at the end of this month, the IGSP will turn six years old and begin a new phase of focus and growth. When we began in January 2003, the IGSP was launched with an ambitious but lightly sketched vision to tackle basic discoveries in the genome sciences and explore their consequences for medicine and society at large. What a difference six years makes.
"If anything, the need for an IGSP is even greater now than it was six years ago."Now, over 300 faculty, staff and students at all levels are engaged in IGSP research and educational programs. The initial rough sketch of a federation of research centers has grown to become an integrated academic network of seven IGSP Centers that span collaborative and interdisciplinary research and educational activities in nearly all of Duke's schools. Our research breakthroughs span an impressively broad range, from evolution to human genetics to studies of disease and clinical trials. There are robust educational programs at the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels, complemented by general Genome Academy programs directed at the broader campus community. In the span of six years, early buzz about the completion of the Human Genome Project has given way to ever more sophisticated tools and approaches for capitalizing on sequences of now more than 500 different species whose complete genomes are but a click away online. A generation of genome skeptics has given way to a generation of students who are now as apt to design experiments in silico as in vitro. For many of them, genomes aren't so revolutionary; after all, they have never known a scientific world without databases full of genomes and a cache of software to analyze them. And discussions about the promises and pitfalls of knowing our own sequence have moved beyond the academy and are now just as likely to occur in company boardrooms, the halls of Congress or even at neighborhood "spit parties," where samples of saliva are sent off for analysis by one of several personal genomics companies.
The IGSP has become many things to many people. For some, we offer an interdisciplinary intellectual base. For others, we represent a source of ready expertise and technology, either through the core services we offer or by virtue of collaborations. For yet others, we represent an opportunity to learn and think about important scientific, social and philosophical questions that have real consequences for how we lead our lives and how we think about our origins and our destinies.
So, yes, we've been launched. However, the genome world is a very different place now than it was six years ago, and the Genome Revolution is moving ahead at an ever-faster pace. It's a movement that is developing in real-time, with the public as active participants and even drivers of what has become as much a social revolution as a scientific one. If anything, the need for an IGSP is even greater now than it was six years ago.
A hallmark of the IGSP has been the breadth of individuals and programs that comprise our activities – from sequence to single cells, from individual genes and proteins to interacting networks and systems, from untold numbers of digital codes buried within our genomes to complex interactions between our genes and the environment, from individual organisms to populations and ecologies, from the most arcane critters, plants and microbes of the natural world to our own human families, from the origins of species over many millions of years to predictions about the future, from the most basic of genome discoveries to the widest policy and social implications of knowing and utilizing that information.
While that breadth is a strength, it also requires periodic review to ensure that we are developing sufficient depth in those areas that are ripe for exploration and where we are best primed to make major contributions nationally and internationally. The question now becomes how we might best organize and concentrate our resources to take advantage of current opportunities in the field and meet the needs of our constituencies, both at Duke and beyond.
As we turn the page, it strikes me that there are four key areas that deserve and require our sharp focus in the years ahead:
- First, our understanding of human genome variation is in the process of a transformation, catalyzed by improvements in "Next Gen" sequencing technology and by a shift in thinking about the roles of common and rare genome variants in shaping biological traits, including disease. IGSP scientists are playing a major role in leading this transformation, and we will need to continue to invest in this area to ensure that we are best positioned – both intellectually and technologically – to capitalize on this strength.
- Second, and complementary to the first, we will dedicate resources to expand the IGSP's efforts in genomic and personalized medicine, building on our already very substantial success in creating both the scientific basis for and the infrastructure for using genomic data to understand the genome and its expression as it relates to disease and clinical management. Duke is already positioned nationally to take the lead in these areas, and the IGSP can and should play a critical role in relating these advances to improvements in clinical medicine.
- These roads, however, will require an ability to organize, move, analyze and work with data in volumes not dreamed of a few years ago. Both in medicine and in basic science, this critical dependence on digital data requires continuing investments in the quantitative sciences. We must deepen our faculty ranks in computational biology and medicine, statistics and mathematics, expand our graduate and undergraduate programs, and provide resources and tools to encourage access to and facility with vast amounts of data. That may not sound sexy, but I am convinced that the entire enterprise depends on it. Institutions that develop the academic and technical infrastructure to foster careers and train the next generation of data-immersed scientists, physicians and engineers will "win". Darwin taughtus that...
- And lastly, we need to bolster our efforts at the interface of genetics and society. Given the nature of the IGSP and Duke's commitment to develop both science and policy in key areas of interdisciplinary investment, this is a most critical part of our mission. Institutional strengths in scholarship related to the impact of technological innovation, intellectual property, race and ancestry, health disparities, and public attitudes and education can now be focused on the rapidly expanding capabilities in personal genomics and on the social, economic and organizational costs of transforming our approach to health care. Duke's leaders eight years ago were prescient enough to recognize the value of putting both "S" and "P" together in the IGSP. Now it’s time to prove them right.
Over the past six years, the field of genome research – both at Duke and elsewhere – has been marked by wonder at the pace of new discoveries, the rapidly rising capability of new technology, and the sheer volume of data being generated. Now, as we enter a different phase, we can expect to be judged by how well those discoveries, technology and data can be used for the benefit of society – in health care, in education, in personalizing and democratizing our genomes, and in public engagement and stewardship at all levels.
Huntington F. Willard
Director