Q&A with Bill Amos, 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?
Professor of Evolutionary Genetics, Department of Zoology, Cambridge University.
My job is split between teaching and research. For teaching I give lectures to undergraduates and run an ecology field course in Norfolk. My research is wide-ranging because I am allowed to follow my interests. Although everything I look into has a genetic theme, the work itself ranges from molecular studies of how DNA itself evolves, right up to more ecological studies, using genetic methods like DNA fingerprinting to uncover the inner workings of animal societies. A lot of my work involves marine mammals, whales and seals. Recently I have become more interested in looking at how genetics can influence an individual’s susceptibility to disease.
Q. How can your work/ research be used in everyday life?
My molecular studies help to understand how DNA changes over time and this understanding can be used in many ways: to reconstruct the population history of humans, to understand how genetic variability is spread across populations, with implications for why populations vary in, for example, incidence of cancer. Current work has found a link between genetics and tuberculosis in cattle and could both save a lot of badgers (if we can show that it is the parents of each cow that have the biggest influence on whether it contracts TB) and also help to control TB in cattle by devising breeding strategies to maximise genetic resistance. Studies aimed at working out animal population structure have applications in both management of abundant species and conservation of endangered species. At the molecular end, I am interested in how DNA evolves: which mutations are most likely to occur and what genes they will affect. Understanding these processes can help in our understanding of genetic diseases in humans.
Q. What is the most exciting thing about your work?
Everything! I do research because I find it exciting. Every time I get an interesting result I feel elated, and this could involve humans one week, whales the next week or a piece of DNA the week after. It may sound crazy, and would have done to me when I was at school, but one graph or one statistical test that helps to prove a theory can make me as happy as someone whose favourite team has just won the cup. Moreover, since you often don’t know when the discovery will be made, I spend a lot of time in excited anticipation!
Q. Why do you study human diversity?
Human diversity is intriguing because we would all like to know more about where we came from. It is also important from a practical point of view, namely understanding why people differ so much in who gets ill and who doesn’t, why some people get better in hospital and some don’t and why diseases like autism, dementia and many allergies are increasing. Human research is highly competitive because so many people around the world are involved, but the up side is that there are huge amounts of publicly available data that, when analysed correctly, allow one to answer almost any question you like. These days a scientist with access to the web and a good imagination can conduct really amazing studies for little more than the price of a computer!
Q. What are the highs?
The highs are undoubtedly finding out something that no one else knows. Best of all is to find strong evidence or even proof of a theory that goes against what everyone else believes, something truly novel. Imagine the thrill of Pasteur when he heated soup to a high temperature, sealed it in a glass vessel and it did not go off, thereby showing that rotting is not some kind of magic, spontaneous event but depends on invisible life (bacteria) that are killed by heat. Or when Watson and Crick realised that DNA was double-stranded, so immediately revealing how genetic information could be copied by separating the strands and using each as the template for another.
Q. What are the lows?
The lows mainly involve the framework within which science operates, which can at times seem totally unfair and unregulated. The twin life-bloods of science are funding and publication: money to do the research and then an outlet to tell everyone what you find. Both depend on the referee process where your work is assessed by other scientists. Naturally everyone varies in their opinions, and just as it is sometimes embarrassingly nice to get ones weakest work complemented, it is unimaginably frustrating to have your best work criticised. If the criticism is fair, then fine, but sometimes you know that the referee has overlooked something or got the wrong end of the stick, and you as a scientist often have little opportunity to fight back: the referee’s decision is final! Although one gets used to this with time, the process can be extremely disheartening for a young scientist early in their career.
Q. How can I get into this area of science? What should I study?
Being a good, successful and happy scientist is not easy! There is a fair chance that if you are thinking ‘maybe I could try science’ you probably won’t enjoy it. In my experience, the people who do best at science and get the most out of it have a passion for it. When I was a kid, nothing gave me a greater thrill than finding out new things, whether this involved looking under a stone on the sea shore or finding insects on a walk in the country. Waking up knowing that my moth trap had been running all night and could hold an amazing hawk-moth or other treasure would give me the sort of thrill most people get on Christmas morning.
Having said this, those who are keen can have any of several backgrounds. Biology is good, but many enter through skills in computing or mathematics. When I chose my undergraduate degree I looked for a course where I would not have to take either of the two areas I hated from school: genetics and statistics the two subjects I now lecture! What really matters is a drive to learn and to discover.
These days there is a lot of ‘big science’, large projects like determining the entire human genomes (every letter in the human book of life). This means less bench science, because a lot of the work is done by robotic machines, and more interpretive science, the handling and interpretation of large amounts of data. Indeed, I do a lot of research simply by analysing public domain data I download from the web. People with skills in organising can conduct excellent research by managing the processing of samples. People with skills in computing are very much demand to analyse the data that are generated. Those who are mathematically and statistically minded can easily find work developing new ways to get maximum information out of data. Of course, biology should not be forgotten, and a key part of science is to ask the right question. This requires imagination and lateral thinking layered onto a good grasp of what is already known. Above all, you need what I said at the beginning, a thirst for knowledge and the ability to extract pleasure and delight from the process of discovery.
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