Episode 1 - Introduction to Genomics Futures Transcript
Show notes
Speakers:
Senjuti Saha, researcher at the Child Health Research Foundation in Bangladesh;
Alexandra Canet, science communicator and producer of the Genomics Futures podcasts;
Tariq Khokar, Head of Data for Science and Health at Wellcome;
Matt Hurles, Wellcome Sanger Institute Director;
Julia Wilson, Director of Strategy, Partnerships and Innovations at Wellcome Sanger Institute;
Kat Gold, Research Lead from the Discovery Research Team at Wellcome;
Matt Kaiser, Head of Major Initiatives at Wellcome;
Patricia Kingori, sociologist and researcher at Oxford University;
Itai Yanai, Director of the Institute for Computational Medicine at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
Episode description:
An introduction to the Genomics Futures workshop series with interviews with the key project sponsors and speakers.
Mentioned in the episode:
- Human Genome Project – a landmark 13-year international research effort (1990-2003) that successfully mapped and sequenced the entire human genetic blueprint.
- Wellcome – a global charitable foundation
- Wellcome Sanger Institute – a world leading research institute
- Genomics Futures Workshop Series – a series of six horizon scanning workshops held in 2025, hosted by the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Wellcome.
- One Health – an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems.
- AlphaFold – an artificial intelligence programme, which performs predictions of protein structure
- Chrononormativity – a term coined by Elizabeth Freeman.
- Night science and Day science – terms defined by François Jacob in his autobiography, titled The Statue Within.
Transcript
Senjuti Saha 00:00
Genomics, I hope, will become an infrastructure, and it will not remain a luxury. In my ideal world, I think by 2050 I want genomics to sit kind of where electricity in Bangladesh sits right now, right, a basic infrastructure that communities control and use daily.
Alexandra Canet 00:22
What will the future of genomics look like in 2050?
The Wellcome Sanger Institute and Wellcome decided to embark on a time travelling adventure. Fast forward 25 years, and what will genomics be able to achieve.
Bill Clinton 00:39
We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome.
Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind, the moment we are here to witness… [fades into background]
Alexandra Canet 00:57
On June 26 of the year 2000, American President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced the first completion of the Human Genome Project. The potential was huge, so was the excitement. But now looking 25 years ahead, what will genomics help us achieve?
That’s what the Genomics Futures workshops were set out to explore, a total of six gatherings over six months, delving into how genomics can make a difference, on understanding disease, sustaining life on earth, or on measuring and engineering life, among other topics.
Tariq Khokhar 01:30
I’m trying to imagine, what is the 25 year future version of me coming back in time to tell me to do? It’s been a very instructive exercise, and just as a macro point, I think more organisations should think and plan these sorts of horizons, and possibly even longer.
Alexandra Canet 01:48
At the beginning of this podcast, we heard Bangladeshi researcher and activist Senjuti Saha talk about her wish for the future, for genomics to be like electricity, a common tool that serves us all. Just now, we heard from Tariq Khokhar from Wellcome about his own experience after going through this exercise.
Throughout these six podcasts, we will be talking with other workshop attendees to get their thoughts and insights on what was discussed, where they think genomics will stand in 25 years time, and what needs to happen now to get there. I’m Alexandra Canet, science communicator and producer of these podcasts, alongside my colleague, Olivia Allen, who is Head of Strategy at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
Today with us, we have Professor Matt Hurles, Wellcome Sanger Director and main instigator of the project. Hello, Matt.
Matt Hurles 02:38
Hi Alex. Pleasure to be with you today.
Alexandra Canet 02:41
I believe you have been involved in all of the workshops, and have also chaired one. And also today we have Dr Julia Wilson, Director of the Strategy, Partnerships and Innovation department at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, whose team has led on the delivery of the workshops. And I believe you’ve also attended all six of them. Hello, Julia.
Julia Wilson 02:57
Hello Alex. It was a really exciting project to lead.
Alexandra Canet 03:00
Yes, fantastic, and we’ll be hearing all about it from you and participants that have been to all the six workshops.
So my first question is for you, Matt, you were appointed director of the Wellcome Sanger Institute in spring 2023 and I believe you spent your first year reflecting and writing Sanger’s 10 year strategy. Were the workshops part of this strategy?
Matt Hurles 03:22
They were, so a key part of the reflecting that I did when writing the strategy was just how rapidly genomics changes over time, and the real importance of horizon scanning. And so being really intentional about horizon scanning could be really important for identifying the opportunities where Sanger can really make a difference. The workshops are a key kind of first step in that, in terms of trialling out a new approach that we haven’t done before. It’s 25 years since the human genome came out, and so thinking 25 years into the future takes us to 2050 and there’s a kind of neatness to that. There’s a kind of a framing there that I think helps participants in the workshops think beyond the kind of normal five year cycle of planning science and developing roadmaps and applying for funding. I think we’ve learned over the course of the workshops ways in which to get the participants to be more comfortable thinking about the 25 years. Licencing them to think outrageously has been part of that, and one framing that we recently used in the workshop that I chaired was this idea of utopian and dystopian views of the future, so moving away from maybe five year plans that we then feel we have a responsibility to deliver, and therefore, you know, are somewhat constrained by that to being a bit more outrageous was, I think, helped participants get beyond their normal planning cycles.
Alexandra Canet 04:50
So Matt and Julia, all six workshops were looking at the future of genomics as you said, specifically genomics in 2050. Each was within a specific topic, but I believe there have been recurrent themes that have been coming up and up. Can you tell us about them?
Matt Hurles 05:00
So I think one of the themes that I expected to come up was around new technologies. We saw a number of discussions that centred around wearable technologies, the idea that gives a much more, much more dynamic, longitudinal molecular characterisation of people.
But also we had quite a lot of discussions around increasing lab automation. And in some sense, there’s two technological directions, one being a very democratised future where everyone’s generating data on themselves, and another being a much more centralised future where potentially large automated laboratories are, where much of the science, or at least much of the data, gets generated.
The technology component to it, I think it was a cultural component that came out to it in terms of still shrugging off some of the legacies of being a kind of Western centric, human centric, sometimes male centric, kind of endeavour that is science. And so thinking a bit about what does residual paternalism in medicine look like in 2050? Is the phrase global health really equitable? How do we give legal rights to biodiversity and ecosystems in a way that enables us to protect them?
Julia Wilson 06:31
Yes, there was, as well as the big leaps in technology and automation, there was a real focus on who will be doing science in the future? what skills will they need? Where will they be based? And I think, you know, we’ve got a lot of great minds here at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, but some of that research should be done where the disease burden is, be that in infectious disease, or be that in obesity, you know, that we can’t just be thinking about that we do the science here, and then it can be transmitted to other areas of the country or the globe. And so there was a, there was a real push about those things that we we really need to be thinking about how we train genomic scientists in the future and send them off into the scientific community, either into academia, into commercial organisations, into healthcare systems as well. So it was the ethical issues that were coming up were really holistic about how we work as an ecosystem, how we can affect change over the next 25 years.
Alexandra Canet 07:45
I was extremely surprised by the amount of times that public trust came up. Was that something that surprised you? Were you expecting this to come out?
Julia Wilson 07:54
I think public trust often comes up when one’s talking about genomics and particularly moving into healthcare settings where that data is very personal to the individuals. But I don’t think any of the workshops saw public trust as a threat to the future or as a, as something that was inhibiting science currently, but just to be aware that the public are very data literate, very AI literate, increasingly genomic literate, and therefore there are other conversations to be had.
Alexandra Canet 08:33
And it’s that these are all broad topics that affect all of us, and I believe that diversity was at the core of the planning working groups. What was done to make sure that all voices could express their views?
Matt Hurles 08:46
We really succeeded in one of my kind of benchmarks for being diverse. Pretty much all of the workshops we had, nobody in the workshops knew most of the people in the room when they started.
So we weren’t having the same people talking on the same topics as we were used to. I think that started really with thinking carefully about the kind of programme groups that kind of came together around each workshop, and making sure that they were sufficiently broad, both kind of geographically and in terms of sector. So we had people who could advocate from the outset that certain voices were going to be really important to hear, whether that be kind of sector or geography or ancestry or gender.
Julia Wilson 09:31
And I would say we did host one of the workshops at a partner organisation in Thailand as well to bring in that geographical diversity, but also people from different types of organisation, where we had academia, commercial funders, third sector policy makers, all in one melting pot. So it really meant that we were working across what would normally be quite traditional boundaries where nobody actually speaks. We’re all in the same sector, but we all speak slightly different languages and have slightly different motivation. So we really managed to break that down in the room and have some really fruitful and unusual discussions.
Matt Hurles 10:16
Actually, going back to the diversity question is having this be co organised by Sanger and Wellcome meant that, you know, Wellcome could reach out into its international network and make sure we were bringing in different voices that we wouldn’t necessarily have encountered, as, you know, within genomic science and Sanger. But I think that combination of having two different organisations with two different networks, co-convening, was really powerful.
Alexandra Canet 10:43
The workshops were co organised with Wellcome, one of the biggest funders in life sciences worldwide.
We spoke to Dr Kat Gold and Dr Matt Kaiser, both from the Discovery Research team at Wellcome.
Kat Gold 10:55
The workshops were a really interesting opportunity for us to create a space to bring people together, to really try and challenge ourselves and each other, to think long term about the horizons of the future. And this is something that everyone you know, often people say humans are very bad at prediction and when you think about how research operates and how the scientific landscape changes with time, you know, often there are these game changing technologies that come along, and actually, no one could have quite predicted those trajectories. But it’s a really important aspect of, I think, how Wellcome operates as a funder and as an institution that’s thinking about a healthier future for everyone, to try and understand where things are headed, what challenges and barriers people are experiencing, and actually where they would really like to get to and to push that out as far as possible. So there were lots of interesting questions, and I think there was a broader theme of equity and equity in health and research, which maybe we can unpack too. But there was certainly a question that was raised at a workshop that was more focused on biodiversity, and it was really around a lot of our thinking in the health space, you know, it does centre human health, and certainly at Wellcome we, you know, we often think from a kind of a human health perspective. But if we think about the planet, the vast majority of it is ocean, and it’s not inhabited by humans, and actually do in some way, when we think about, you know, the oncoming or the climate crisis that we have right now, should we be decentering on some level, you know, human centric notions and trying to think a little bit more about what it means to have a kind of planetary, kind of ethics, or acknowledge that, you know, the planet. And that’s probably thinking that’s gone on for some time, in, you know, ecological and climate spaces, and feeds into maybe what is often called a One Health agenda, so the idea that, you know, human health is completely interlinked with kind of broader, the health of broader ecosystems. But I thought that was a, it was an interesting challenge, actually.
Matt Kaiser 13:05
Well, I guess a big theme, and it’s perhaps not so surprising that AI and machine learning played a kind of central role in lots of the conversations. And it was quite interesting when trying to think about, well, what’s the world going to look like in 25 years time? And actually, if we cast our minds back 25 years before, I think there’s a recognition that no one would have predicted some of the AI tools that we have available now, like like AlphaFold, and some of the large language models which people are now incorporated into their into their research and into their everyday life.
And so in recognising that kind of difficulty, in projecting that 25 years,I think there was still a recognition that it will fundamentally transform the types of questions that we’re able to ask, even the way that we conduct research, which kind of brought out some interesting ideas about how we sort of train the next generation of researchers, how we kind of equip them for this world of where actually we’ll have greater automation, in a way, through lab in the loop type technologies that are kind of integrated experimental workflows, connecting real, real world, kind of, hardware with simulated environments to be able to kind of conduct experiments in real time, but it iteratively generate insight. And so where does the researcher fit into that? And actually the way then that we might think about the training that we give some of these, the researchers, they’re kind of that typical model of, you know, a PhD student spending three or four years in a in one research group, conducting what was often a time consuming and painstaking series of experiments to to kind of conclude this, this, you know, three to four year project perhaps might not be fit for the future, and we’re going to need much more interdisciplinarity and much more kind of porosity of people being able to be conversant across different areas and really understand the data science and the AI, so that we kind of understand what we’re applying to our research, so that we understand the insights that it generated from that.
Alexandra Canet 15:45
Oxford sociologist, Dr Patricia Kingori, was one of the participants of the workshops. She made us reflect on the concept of time, power dynamics, equity and how to think about genomics from a sociological perspective.
Patricia Kingori 16:00
I think the developments in genomics are really exciting, and they always have been. And then the next 25 years, I think there’s going to be huge amounts of developments, but I think just what those developments are, I think is really unknown, and I think it’s worthwhile taking time to think about what we want to happen in the next 25 years. And so I think the question is a great question, because I think it forces us to think about, what kind of future do we want?
Alexandra Canet 16:34
You made, during the workshop you made us reflect on a concept I had never heard about. I’m going to try and spell it out and say it, chrononormativity. Did I say that? Right?
[Patricia] Yes, yes, yes.
Alexandra Canet 16:46
And you also made us reflect on what 25 years means to different communities, to different regions. Can you tell us a bit more about this concept?
Patricia Kingori 16:57
Yeah, well, the concept isn’t mine. It’s important to give credit to Elizabeth Freeman, the person who really was one of the first people to really take seriously this idea about how human bodies can be organised around different understandings of time and the way that just by how we think about time can include or exclude certain people.
So, you know, there’s that famous saying, you know, “she who controls time controls”. So, the time is a really important way of controlling other people. If I give you a deadline of, I don’t know, 25 years to fix all of the world’s problems, just in that task alone, just in the way that I’ve framed that, I am shaping not only your life, but I’m making it really clear that I’m the person that has the power to do that. And one of the things that has been a kind of constant feature, at least, of kind of 20th century science has been this pursuit of goals with really tight deadlines. You know, cures, cures for cancers, cures for HIV, developments of vaccines and really short posts, short spaces of time.
And what that does is it’s not only about kind of pressure and kind of, you know, sort of velocity, so USP the momentum, but it’s also actually, it does something to the way that goals look. It does something to the way that people think of something as being achievable or not. It also garners resources in a certain type of direction. So I think this idea of chrononormativity is like a big word for really quite a simple ideas and I think some of the best ideas are the simplest, which is, what does time do to shape what we think is or isn’t possible, and what does the way that we frame time do to certain people?
So another example that comes from the disabilities movement, which I always find really helpful to think with, is if someone has mobility issues, it just takes them much longer to navigate a city. So we’ve got to think about, if they’re going to use London Transport or public transport, how long it takes them to get on enough buses, on enough tubes. So if I set a doctor’s appointment for nine o’clock the person with mobility issues will have to spend a much longer period of time and many more resources to be able to make that nine o’clock appointment than somebody that doesn’t have mobility issues and I think if we take that one idea and extend it across lots of different areas of our lives, we then start to see the way that how we use time affects other people, and how we think about time shapes people’s experiences. And so I think that’s essentially what that concept does I think to, in terms of forcing us to think about what science is doing when we set these sorts of these deadlines, like 25 years.
Alexandra Canet 20:35
Another thing that came out at the workshop Patricia was this big theme that was called equitable life sciences ecosystem. But what does equity mean in the context of genomics, and what would achieving equity in 2050 actually look like?
Patricia Kingori 20:52
I mean, it’s a big question. I think it looks so completely different depending on where you are in the world and who you are and what you think matters. So I think just from some of the research that I’ve done with genomic scientists in the Global South, equitable research looks very different, I think, from that perspective, and that is often the ability, including having access to resources to do the types of work that they think is important in that particular context. And I think that there is a long way to go in order to achieve that.
And I think many people will say, Well, why am I waiting 25 years for that, you could make that happen, really, in five years, easily, and this is how, and if you listen to us, we can tell you how. You’re making this, something that is in the future and by doing that actually, you’re making it harder for us to obtain that. You know, 25 years is a whole generation, if you’re talking to somebody who’s a mid-career person in 25 years, if they’re still in science, entering the latter years of their career.
Alexandra Canet 22:15
Dr Itai Yanai is professor at the New York University School of Medicine, and attended the very first workshop. There he spoke about the use of day science and night science as useful tools for this exercise to try and cast our thoughts 25 years into the future.
Itai Yanai 22:31
The way I see it is a great gift that genomics gives for us is it gives us a great playground to play in. It gives us this huge resource that allows us to explore and it’s very difficult to imagine 2050. It feels exorbitantly far away to make any predictions about, but looking back at, say, the last 25 years, I can say that back then, we didn’t have a single genome. Now we have the genomes available of so many different species, and that allows us to then work in a kind of hypothesis free way, in an exploratory way. And I can give you one example that I discussed in the workshop also about how we took advantage of that, and that is to make a discovery on insights for how we as humans lost our tail, or rather, how our ancestors, 25 million years ago, lost our tail. You know, when you go to the zoo, any kid makes this observation that some animals have a tail, like the lemurs, the macaques and some primates, some monkeys do not have a tail like the chimpanzees like us. So why is that? Well, if you take a comparative genomics approach, that is, you take advantage of the fact that we have the genomes of all these species, you can now explore and say, hey, like, what is it about this collection of species that distinguishes those that have a tail and those that do not, and that’s what we did in my lab. It was led by a brilliant PhD student, Bo Xia, and he identified this genomic region, and we tested it. We actually made that same mutation in a mouse, and that mouse lost its tail. And so we have a plausible scenario for how we lost our tail. And that’s incredible. And I think it could only have been possible with this resource, this genomics resource that we could go exploring in.
So if I just use that as an example and extrapolate forward, I think that what we need is more data to explore in.
Alexandra Canet 25:09
That sets the scene really well for my next question, because I think very much during the workshop, you talked about how we do science, and you mentioned two concepts that they were they were new for me and I…
[Itai] oh yeah?
they were fantastic, yes. So you talk specifically about day science and night science. Can you tell us a little bit about these concepts?
Itai Yanai 25:31
Right, so this is a very catchy set of terms that was introduced by the great biologist Francois Jacob who, of course, worked with Jacques Monod, and together they discovered how genes are regulated, which is a crucial concept. And when he wrote his autobiography, he could have perhaps told this story of how he’s so great and how he predicted all these discoveries, but instead, what he describes in his book is what he called day science and night science.
Day Science is the part we’re more familiar with, because it’s all about what you do when you have an idea, how you go about testing it, how you design an experiment with controls that’s sufficiently powered and avoid fooling yourself with artefacts and basically, how do you test an idea. That’s called hypothesis driven research.
The thing is, though, what you have to realise is that’s only half the story, because that presumes you already have the idea. In many cases, getting to that idea, that’s the really difficult part, like, where did you get that idea? And you can say, well, that’s just psychology, or who knows where you get the idea? Oh, it’s such a mysterious process. It’s almost like voodoo. It’s magic. We can’t talk about it. Maybe you could say it’s not scientific to even say where does the idea come from? And some people do say that. Some people even say you either have it or you don’t, even though we all agree, it’s crucial to have a process for how you get the idea. That’s what Jacob called Night Science. Night Science is that part where we’re looking for the idea. Even though we all acknowledge it’s important, what we don’t acknowledge is that it is teachable. And there are tricks that scientists lean on, dependably and all experienced scientists like me, for example, so I started grad school 27 years ago. It’s hard to accept that, but that’s the truth. And in that time, I’ve picked up some tricks. I’ve seen things work like, for example, I’ve learned how to take any idea from one field and bring it into my field. I’ve learned how to have improvisational discussions with other people, that kind of mindset that you need. I’ve learned all these tricks, and my friends have also learned them. The thing is, though it’s been a hard road, and no one ever taught them to us formally, and it’s been very sort of frustrating to sort of accept that people have not taught us these dependable and well known tricks.
Alexandra Canet 28:36
To bring today’s podcast to a close, I went back to Professor Matt Hurles, main organiser of the workshops, to ask him about what will be the outcomes of these gatherings. He also gives us a teaser of some of the themes we’ll talk about in the following episodes.
Matt Hurles 28:52
So we didn’t have a hard coded view going into the workshops, what ought to be coming out. It’s part of the experiment really to see what was what really, what were the participants motivated to come out of it? And I think the example around global health was something that kind of grew out of the conversations that the workshop stimulated, and a group of people really passionate to deliver that. And then I think similarly around biodiversity, I think there’s similar voices coming together where, where maybe we’ve catalysed something, but it isn’t necessarily badged as coming from that workshop, just that we catalysed a group of people to come together and realise there was a real opportunity to produce something that would be impactful.
One final reflection is just how grateful we are about so many of the people who came from so far and wide and spent time in their busy schedules together. And it wouldn’t have been successful without that kind of commitment from people from different countries, different sectors, people who would have received the invitation say, why am I being invited? Because I’m not really a genomicist. So, it required a lot of commitment of time and also openness for these workshops to be successful, and so I’m really grateful that people did that.
Alexandra Canet 30:16
Thank you for listening to the first episode of the Genomics Future series. In the next episode, we will delve into one of the first workshops, Our Relationship with Microbial Life, with experts from different continents providing their view on the future of microbiome research, the significance of global health or the importance of representation in big data sets. If you want to get in contact, please do, you might agree, disagree, or have your own thoughts about the topics and themes covered in these conversations. We’d love to hear them. You can get in touch with us at genomicsfutures@sanger.ac.uk
