Extra Credit Blog #1

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Dr. Reardon getting ready to present her lecture

On May 18, 2018, I attended a lecture that was the last part of the Social Genome series of lectures. It was hosted by a guest presenter by the name of Jenny Reardon who was from UC Santa Cruz. The title of the lecture was "Just Genomes?" The presentation at first seemed like it was going to be similar to the first one I attended by Dr. Daniel Navon from UC San Diego who purely talked about just genes. Once Jenny started going over the material she was going to be presenting, I noticed it was slightly different from the earlier lecture. Dr. Reardon kept talking about her book and I couldn't really understand what was the connection between the two because I did not read her book. She mentioned how we could make a correlation between race and genetics and ways we should talk about it, and ways we should not talk about it along with ways people can looking into someone's genome.

One of the slides from the presentation
Between the lectures by Dr. Navon and Dr. Reardon there were a few similarities, primarily because both their presentations mainly focused on genomes. Reardon was talking about how a lot of people think the next medical breakthroughs are going to come due to the fact that people are trying to solve genome codes. There are people out there that are trying to solve a $1,000 genomic project because essentially genomics are solvable puzzle in biology. In Navon's presentation he was more focused on genomes and the 'genomic designation' as to how new condition were discovered because of genetic mutations (Navon, 2018). I was also trying to figure out in what past units did we describe something along these lines and then I made the connection that in MedArt we discussed a little bit about this too, when we said that people are trying to do clinical trials and they need a lot of money to complete the tasks. It also connects with the main topics in this class which are art, science, and technology. Since genomics is a form of art and science we are using new technological advancements to get us to where we want to be. With the advancements in the medical field, it will make it easier for people to understand genomics in a few year, once more medical breakthroughs occur, which will diversify science even more.
My classmates and I at the event

All in all, this event was definitely more complex than the others, but in the end it all made sense. It allowed me to understand the details behind genomics and why people are investing a lot of money into that field now. I can use some of these ideas in the final because it can give me ideas of other artists that used genomics as their main idea. I would definitely recommend this event to someone else because it gives them an even deeper perspective into genomics.





Reardon, Jenny PhD. “Just Genomes?”. The Social Genome Knowledge and Politics in a Postgenomic Society, 18 April 2018, La Kretz Garden Pavilion, room 1101, Los Angeles, CA. Presentation. 

Navon, Daniel PhD. “The gene didn’t get the memo”. The Social Genome Knowledge & Politics in a Postgenomic Society, 13 April 2018, La Kretz Garden Pavilion, room 1101, Los Angeles, CA. Presentation

Uconlineprogram. Medicine pt3. YouTube. April 22, 2012. Length 21:19
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIX-9mXd3Y4

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