Genes, Computers, and Medicine

Saturday, February 20, 2016
2:30-4:30 p.m.

Past Event

Developments in computational neuroscience, molecular biology, and genomics have opened up new ways of looking at disease. In a relatively short time span, these advances may lead to significant innovations in the understanding of various diseases, as well as in therapeutics designed to treat them. How might these changes affect our perceptions and experiences of illness and treatment? How might they also become useful in investigating the etiology of mental disorders and responding to them?

Participants:

James Dahlman

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Tech

James Dahlman is a chemical / bioengineer who works at the interface of nanotechnology, genomics, and gene editing. He is studying gene editing with Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute. He received his PhD from MIT and Harvard Medical School in 2014, where he studied RNA delivery and gene therapies with Robert Langer and Daniel… read more »

Francis Lee

Mortimer D. Sackler Professor & Vice Chair for Research, Department of Psychiatry, Weill-Cornell Medical College

View Papers / Presentations »

Francis Lee is the Mortimer D. Sackler Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College, and attending psychiatrist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He received his MD and PhD from the University of Michigan, and psychiatry training at Payne Whitney Clinic and completed postdoctoral training, at New York University… read more »

Karen Maschke

Researcher Scholar, The Hastings Center

Karen J. Maschke is a Research Scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in Garrison, New York. She has a PhD in political science from Johns Hopkins University, a master’s degree in bioethics from Case Western Reserve University, and was a Bioethics Fellow at the Cleveland Clinic, an academic medical center in Cleveland,… read more »

Hans-Guido Wendel

Principal Investigator at the Cancer Genetics Laboratory at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

Dr. Hans-Guido Wendel, M.D. is a Principal Investigator at the Cancer Genetics Laboratory at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He works to identify new cancer therapies based on the genetic origins of the disease. He come from Germany and trained in medicine in Aachen and Edinburgh and is currently an Associate Member of the Sloan-Kettering Institute…. read more »

One comment on “Genes, Computers, and Medicine

  1. Great discussion, as usual. The video cuts off at the end – any chance of fixing this?

    I found fascinating the discussion around the ‘missing heritability’ in studies associating variance in a gene with variance in a phenotype. The fact that each gene only explains a tiny part of the total heritability is curious, and means that manipulation of single genes will be ineffective (and manipulation of many impractical, and possibly associated with excessive side effects). Perhaps the reason why an understanding at the biochemical level (proteins and their interactions) and hypothesising based on the understanding of biochemical mechanisms is (al least sometimes) effective, is because environmental inputs are fully manifested, whereas at the (epi)genetic level they are not.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Leave the field below empty!