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LAM
ST
EVE
NS,
EDITO
RS
POSTGENOMICS
Perspectives on Biology
after the Genome
POSTGENOMICS
POSTGENOMICS
Perspectives on Biology
after the Genome
Permissions:
Chapter 4, “The Polygenomic Organism,” by John
Dupré, first appeared in The Sociological Review 58
(2010) and is printed by permission of the pub-
lisher, John Wiley and Sons. © 2010 The Author.
Editorial organization © 2010 The Editorial Board
of The Sociological Review.
Parts of Chapter 8, “From Behavior Genetics to
Postgenomics” by Aaron Panofsky, first appeared
as part of his book, Misbehaving Science: Contro-
versies and the Development of Behavior Genetics.
These parts are reproduced by permission of the
publisher, University of Chicago Press © 2014.
All rights reserved.
12 Approaching Postgenomics
Sarah S. Richardson and Hallam Stevens 232
bibliography 243
contributors 281
index 287
foreword Biology’s Love Affair with the Genome
viii foreword
Institutes of Health greatly benefit genome research, but funding focused
principally on genomics can lead to distortions. Aaron Panofsky examines
how certain areas of behavioral genetics have been “lavishly rewarded de-
spite consistent failure to deliver,” while Catherine Bliss looks at how ge-
nomics research in the field of race- and ethnicity-based health disparities
may be crowding out public health and social science approaches.
Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology after the Genome delivers important
scientific and social messages. One scientific message is that the genome
sequencing projects were neither unmitigated successes nor failures, but
rather the start of a newly enabled era in which determining the sequence
of four dna bases is easy, but understanding its role in biological systems
is incredibly challenging. One social message is that postgenomics should
not be simply the playground of former genomicists now turned postgen-
omicists. Instead, there is a credible argument for a “reset” and evaluation
of what the most promising and fruitful areas of investigation are likely to
be. We should resist the temptation to merely declare the “obvious” next
steps: epigenetics, environmental characterization, and large-scale popula-
tion sequencing. Rather, we should pause and consider the range of soci-
etal and scientific responses to the past fifteen years of work and choose
questions and strategies that allow us to marry discovery and its beneficial
applications.
russ altman
Palo Alto, California
January 2014
foreword ix
contributors
russ altman
http://helix-web.stanford.edu/people/altman/
Russ Altman, md, PhD, is a scientist at Stanford University Medical School,
where he is a professor of bioengineering, genetics, and medicine, and of com-
puter science by courtesy. He is chair of the Department of Bioengineering
and director of the program in Biomedical Informatics. Altman’s research
focuses on the application of bioinformatics to basic molecular biological
problems. Since the inception of the Human Genome Project, Altman has
played a leading role in the development of genomics database and bio-
informatics technologies and of the field of pharmacogenomics. He is a past
president and one of the founding members of the International Society
for Computational Biology. He is the principal investigator for the Pharma-
cogenomics Knowledgebase, a database that curates knowledge about the
impact of genetic variation on drug response for clinicians and researchers.
He is also the principal investigator for the Iranian Genome Project. Altman
received his ba in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard Col-
lege and his md and PhD in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford.