Human Genome Project leader to lecture

Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, will discuss the implications of human genome research Tuesday, March 20, at the university.

Collins is scheduled to give this year’s Hilldale Lecture for the Biological Sciences at 3:30 p.m., 125 Agricultural Hall. The topic for the free public lecture is “Consequences of the Human Genome Project for Medicine and Society.”

Earlier this year, the institute and a private research firm published major papers on the sequencing and initial analysis of the human genome. Much work remains to understand how this “instruction book for human biology” carries out its multitudes of functions.

But the consequences for the practice of medicine and for society are likely to be profound, Collins says. Genetic prediction of individual risks of disease and responsiveness to drugs will reach the medical mainstream in the next decade or so, researchers say.

The development of designer drugs, based on a genomic approach to targeting molecular pathways that are disrupted in disease, could follow soon after, Collins says.

“Potential misuses of genetic information, such as discrimination in obtaining health insurance and in the workplace, will need to be dealt with swiftly and effectively,” Collins adds in an abstract for his planned lecture.

Collins received a B.A. in chemistry in 1970 from the University of Virginia; he obtained a master’s (1972) and Ph.D. from Yale, and a M.D. in 1977 from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In 1993, he became the Director of the National Center for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.

A reception in the Biotechnology Center Atrium will follow the lecture.

The Hilldale Lectures, inaugurated in 1973-74, are sponsored by the four faculty divisions of the University of Wisconsin–Madison: arts and humanities, biological sciences, physical sciences, and social studies. Annually, each division has the opportunity to present a distinguished thinker whose contributions to contemporary culture have received international recognition.