Conversations Across the Creek is an initiative by the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) and the Research School of Chemistry (RSC) to provide a space for continuing dialogue among scientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars. Meetings are held monthly, with the aim of stimulating and unearthing research and teaching collaborations across the university.

Join us for the second Conversation for 2019, where three diverse scholars present on their latest research. The topic of this event is Indigenous Australian Genomics and Pharmacogenetics: Health, Privacy and Relevance.

Modern genomics applied to medicine has already begun to realise direct benefits to patients in hospitals around the world.  Precision medicine has the promise to treat the precise cause of genetic diseases and cancer.  Pharmacogenetics will describe the small genetic differences between us to avoid adverse drug events and ensure correct dosage is administered the first time.

But, most genome sequencing has been done for people of European ancestry.  The subtle genomic differences between populations of people worldwide really matters when it comes to precision medicine and pharmacogenetics.

Efforts to better characterise genomic variation in diverse human populations are being undertaken - but these come from a bad history of insensitive practices and a cultural assumption that all human populations actually want their genomic variation catalogued.

Genome data is the most identifiable information for any given human and presently the legislation that controls this information - its collection, use and storage - have not been tested in sensitive cases.  In this Conversation across the Creek, we will touch on these issues that are broader than just one field of expertise.

Speakers:

Dr Dan Andrews
Centre for Personalised Immunology, John Curtin School of Medical Research

Professor Simon Easteal
National Centre for Indigenous Genomics, John Curtin School of Medical Research

Dr Jason Agostino
Research School of Population Health, ANU College of Health and Medicine

Please register - light lunch provided. Click here for more information about the CatC Series, or to access recordings of past events.