StemCell Therapy

Learn about the building blocks of life and the future of medicine.

The way we diagnose and treat diseases is changing, with new technologies enabled by a deeper understanding of the human genome and its relationship to health and disease.

In HMX Fundamentals Genetics, youll get an overview of key concepts behind the evolving fields of human genetics, genomics, and precision medicine.

For upcoming course dates and application information, visit our Courses page.

Experience a full genetics lesson in the HMX Preview course.

Overview

The Central Dogma and Genetic Variation

Mendelian Inheritance of Disease

Identifying Mendelian Disease Genes

Chromosomal Aberrations

The Genetics of Cancer

Common Complex Traits

Human Population Genetics

Beyond the Genome Sequence

Genetics and Precision Medicine

Lecturer in Genetics, Harvard Medical School

As DNA sequencing becomes cheaper and more readily available, the role of genetics in medicine is expanding. With our increasing understanding of the variation in the human genome, we can start to predict how specific changes in DNA sequence will affect an individuals health. Human genetics is extremely complicated, but it is apparent that many human diseases are influenced by genetics. From a medical perspective, this includes everything from rare DNA sequence variants that drastically increase risk of a disease, to common variants that lead to small changes in risk.

Historically, genetics specialists have helped patients to navigate these situations, but genetics is beginning to permeate medicine as a whole. This means that health care professionals across many fields are faced with new questions. When do you recommend genetic testing to a patient? What kind of testing will provide the most conclusive results? How do you help the patient to understand those results, and use them to make decisions about his or her care? Moving forward, an understanding of the principles of genetics and an ability to apply them in todays medical landscape will be an enormous asset for any health care professional.

Even outside of medicine, genetics has a very important presence in our world today, so, fundamentally, what I would like students to take away from this course is a level of genetic literacy that will allow them to navigate the questions and decisions that they will face in their own lives.

Direct-to-consumer genetic testing now allows everyone to learn about their own genetics; these tests can potentially include information about health and disease risk and ancestry that have significant impacts for individuals and their families. When making decisions about genetic testing, it is important to be informed about exactly what you will learn and what the consequences of the results might be down the line.In this course, we put the fundamental principles of human genetics into the context of the world today, which will provide students with the tools and resources to ask the right questions and make informed genetic decisions.

Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical SchoolAssociate Physician, Brigham and Womens HospitalGeneticist, Brigham and Womens HospitalDirector, Genomes2People Research Program at Brigham and Womens Hospital

Genomics is inherently exciting, and you can see that because of its relationship to forensic law enforcement, reproduction, ancestry, cancer and all sorts of medical developments, and all of the controversy related to direct-to-consumer genetic testing.

The skeleton of genetics is sequencing, and people are building on that with gene expression, proteomics, metabolomics. So there are multiple layers of knowledge and exploration that are generating tremendous excitement in the world, and motivating enormous investment scientifically, educationally, financially, and entrepreneurially. So the question isnt really why Im interested in genomics, the question is why isnt everybody interested in genomics because its so fabulously interesting.

Senior Genetic Counselor and Project Manager, Brigham & Womens Hospital

Genetics is really a subspecialty of all specialties. The more we understand the genetic basis of biology, the more we will understand human health and disease. Having a strong background in genetics will be important as genomic technologies continue to expand and are implemented more and more into clinical care. Understanding how to look for patterns of disease and when to refer a patient to other specialists is an important tool for every health care provider, and as more patients have genetic results in their medical records, having the ability to understand how this is or is not important to your patients medical care will be of the utmost importance. Overall a global knowledge of genetics will help you to provide better care to your future patients.

I hope students are able to grasp some of the basic concepts about genetics and to understand why it is a vital part of medical care. I hope that this background knowledge will be useful to them if and when they care for patients who come to them with a genetic test result, a family history of genetic disease or a presenting genetic diagnosis. I hope this course excites them about the concept of genetics and genomics and encourages them to want to learn more as their career progresses.

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Genetics - HMX | Harvard Medical School

This entry was posted on December 26, 2019 at 7:44 am and is filed under Genetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |