ASHG guest post: Are we serious about education, or not?
As a special treat, I’ve got a guest post from former genetics editor at Nature Chris Gunter. She’s also twittering the event here. How hip!
Aravinda Chakravarti’s presidential address was, of course, thoughtful and fun. He pointed out that it’s our responsibility to educate the public about genetics. I have been coming to the ASHG meeting since 1993, and have worked directly for two ASHG presidents and with many others. I believe every single presidential address I’ve seen since 1993 has made a similar call, for us to engage the community in education. In the age of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, we all know this is more important than ever. Unfortunately, this morning’s session on “the future face of genetics education” was sparsely attended, with only about 100 people. At the risk of repeating a cliché, all geneticists need to be educators, so I wish more people would take a more active interest in the area. It didn’t help that the ASHG scheduled six (SIX!) sessions at the same time and every one was interesting. The speakers discussed introducing genetics at all levels of education (full disclosure: two are colleagues from HudsonAlpha and one is a former colleague from NPG), and ways to measure what we need to teach and how we need to teach it. Many of the scientists attending the meeting will be teaching at some point in academia, or will be talking with their family and friends about genetics. Where were the scientists this morning? Similarly, the plenary session featured a talk on public attitudes toward genetic testing. People literally streamed out in droves right before this talk; they stayed for several research talks beforehand, but didn’t want to hear a data-driven study about how we should most effectively engage the public. This brings me to ask: are we serious about education, or not? Are scientists really uninterested in hearing about education, and how do they think they can afford to feel that way?Posted on behalf of Chris Gunter, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology
**Update: Link fixed. Sorry Chris!
