Q&A with Jim Wilson, Population Geneticist, to inspire and help school children and viewers understand the work geneticists do and how this research is applied.
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Q. What is your job title and what does your work involve?
My job title is population geneticist and my work involves studying the diversity in our DNA. That’s another way of saying I study how everyone’s genetic code varies and what the differences mean for our health, how they help us understand disease and what the variation tells us about our ancestors.
Q. How can your work/ research be used in every day life?
Genetics is important in some areas of life today, but will be much more important in the coming years. It will soon be common to know your own genome sequence (all 3 billion letters of the genetic code), even if it will take longer to understand what this means. Eventually I think this will influence who we marry, depending on the errors we each have in our genetic code; our lifestyles, depending on the susceptibilities we have to diseases; the drugs we are prescribed, depending on our ability to metabolise and respond to them; and our understanding of where we come from, as it will be possible to build a family tree of all humans showing the migrations our ancestors took from Africa all the way to where we were born. Genetics will also become an increasingly important underpinning of the development of new drugs. We can already do some of this, but it’s really only the tip of the iceberg. The pace of technological advance means what is possible is changing every few months.
Q. What is the most exciting thing about your work?
The most exciting thing about my work is discovering new things about human variation. This might reveal something unknown about where a population or individual comes from or about the mechanism of disease.
Q. Why do you study human diversity?
I have been interested in how humans differ from one another for as long as I can remember. I used to try to understand the inheritance of coat colour in my family of cats, and have always been interested in family trees, history and human origins.
Q. What are the highs?
The highs are the intellectual freedom to investigate whatever you are interested in and the incomparable feeling of finding something out for the first time, like the day I realised I was looking at the first genetic evidence for Viking ancestry in Scotland in my own uncle’s DNA! I also enjoy the process of developing an idea into a rounded grant application – as long as it then gets funded!
Q. What are the lows?
The lows are not getting papers accepted in top ranking journals, when you think that something is very interesting but it seems that others don’t share your enthusiasm, or not being awarded a grant for instance because funding budgets are reduced.
Q. How can I get into this area of science? What should I study?
First off it is important to study biology and chemistry, but also statistics and English. Maths is important to be able to make sense of large datasets and good English is a prerequisite to both applying for funding and writing papers which report the exciting findings. At university it is possible to study a range of biology courses, but a degree in genetics is the best!
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