The dramatic race to be the first research team to reveal the human genetic blueprint provides the subject for the next Irish Times/RDS Science Today lecture scheduled for next month.
Dr Kevin Davies will discuss his book, The Sequence, Inside the Race for the Human Genome, which provides an in-depth account of how human DNA was catalogued.
Two teams, led by scientists in the US and Britain, vied to be the first to deliver a sequence and then an initial interpretation of the sequence. The two groups shared the spoils with a joint release of the latter last February.
Dr Davies is well qualified to write about these issues. He was a member of the University of London team hunting for the gene that causes cystic fibrosis.
His book provides a step-by-step account of discoveries made in the 1980s and 1990s along the way towards the sequence. It explains how genes for Huntington's Disease, muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis were identified. It tells of the bitter race between researchers to find the breast cancer gene now known as BRCA-1.
Dr Davies has lived and worked in the US since 1987 and has been a senior editor for a number of the world's leading scientific journals. He founded Nature Genetics, a spin-off publication from Nature, and was the science editor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland. He is now editor-in-chief of Cell Press, publisher of six leading science publications.
The lecture is part of an ongoing commitment by The Irish Times and the Royal Dublin Society to help make people aware of important developments in scientific research. The lectures are designed for the general public and use non-technical language to reach as wide an audience as possible.
Dr Davies' talk takes place at the RDS Concert Hall, Merrion Road, Dublin 4 on Tuesday, November 20th at 7 p.m. Admission to the lecture is free but booking is essential. Telephone: 01-2407217 or e-mail annette.mcdonnell@rds.ie
