Leçon inaugurale Pr Timothy FRAYLING Professeur ordinaire - Chaire Louis-Jeantet Département de médecine génétique et développement, Faculté de médecine UNIGE

The human genome consists of 6 billion letters in a simple DNA code consisting of four « letters » A, C, G, and T. We inherit 3 billion from our mother and 3 billion from our father (men a little less from their father because the Y chromosome is shorter than the X) and several million letters will be different between the copy from our mother compared to the copy from our father.

These differences influence almost everything about us, our height, hair colour, risk of disease and even aspects of our personality – hence the need to choose your parents well!

Prof. Timothy Frayling leads a new research lab at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, the « common disease genetics and genomics » team. They conduct research that aims to identify and understand the variation in our DNA that means some of us will develop conditions such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.

In this presentation, Timothy Frayling will discuss some of the discoveries that have been made recently and why we are on the edge of a very exciting era in human genetics. We now have the technology to read the full 6 billion letters of each person. This ability to read everyone’s resulting « book » will help us understand much better the role their genes play in health.