This is the third in a four-part series of lectures celebrating the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA. These lectures explore the impact this breakthrough is having on scientific discovery today. Part III: Weinberg and Daly discuss how scientists are using genetics to understand disease. Weinberg will present the ways that genetic research impacts our approach to studying and understanding cancer. Daly will discuss how new genomic technologies and computational analysis are aiding in the hunt for disease-causing genes.
Mark Daly's research focuses primarily on statistical genetics and is moving in several exciting directions. Work in the Daly lab is focused on understanding patterns of variation in the human genome and translating that knowledge into more effective statistical methods for finding the variation responsible for the disease. Daly was recently appointed to a new position as a Whitehead/Pfizer Fellow in computational biology. He comes to bioinformatics via a physics background. He received his BS in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989 and joined the Whitehead Institute shortly thereafter as a senior software engineer. In 1996, he was appointed director of the Human Genetics Informatics group at the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research. Daly is active in the traditional statistical genetics field of linkage analysis. His group has developed GENEHUNTER software, which is used by hundreds of labs worldwide, for performing statistical analysis designed to identify genomic regions containing disease risk factors in families. He also serves as an advisor and analyst to several international genetic research collaborations studying inflammatory bowel disease and psoriasis.