Guest post by Michele Markstein and Gregory Davis.

A summary of the May 26, 2020 TAGC 2020 Online workshop, “Raising a Woke Generation of Geneticists: How and Why to Include Eugenics History in Genetics Classes.”

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minnesota police officers, the nation has been wrestling with how to identify and combat systemic racism. As geneticists, it is clear that our field has much work to do, as we have an appallingly small number of Black geneticist colleagues. As solutions are discussed and implemented at the levels of departments, schools, and professional societies, there is a step forward that we can take right away as teachers of genetics: we can include the history of eugenics in our classrooms. This can make our classrooms more inclusive and our discipline more inviting to people it has traditionally alienated. Additionally, teaching eugenics history can help our students learn to combat racist ideology cloaked as “science,” and it can make the next generation of geneticists less likely to repeat the racist mistakes of our past.

If you do not feel equipped to teach eugenics history, you are not alone. It is conspicuously absent from modern genetics textbooks. For this reason and with the support of the GSA, we convened a virtual workshop at the TAGC2020 conference titled, “Raising a Woke Generation of Geneticists: How and Why to Include Eugenics History in Genetics Classes.”

At the workshop it became apparent that many geneticists who are interested in teaching eugenics history shy away from it for two common reasons: (1) they do not feel qualified to teach history, a subject outside their field, and (2) they do not want to risk creating an uncomfortable classroom environment.

We therefore offer the following advice to help you get started:

1. If you are apprehensive about teaching outside of your field of expertise, invite a colleague from across campus to give a guest lecture. Most likely there will be an expert in eugenics history in departments of African-American studies, anthropology, history, legal studies, sociology, and women and gender studies. This is a great way to forge an interdisciplinary relationship on your campus and can be a lot of fun.
2. If you are worried that you cannot navigate “uncomfortable” conversations, don’t worry, there are some simple steps you can take to help everyone in the room. First, everyone in the room does better when there is a reminder at the start that conversations about eugenics are likely to bring up uncomfortable feelings in different ways for different people and that this is OK. Second, students tend to be their best selves when ground rules or guardrails are specified to remind them that we are in this together and that everyone is expected to treat one other with compassion, empathy, and respect. For more tips on creating an inclusive environment, we recommend guidelines from Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching: “Teaching Race: Pedagogy and Practice.” Another helpful article was recommended by participants at the meeting: “Signaling inclusivity in undergraduate biology courses through deliberate framing of genetics topics relevant to gender identity, disability, and race” by Karen Hales.

Additionally, we welcome you to download all the materials from the workshop: a list of recommended resources on eugenics history, a summary of participant survey responses, and panelist slide decks as summarized below. We look forward to the community’s continued interest and work in the field, and a future in which teaching eugenics history in genetics is as commonplace as teaching Punnett squares.

Summary of workshop materials:

1. A list of recommended resources compiled from panelist and participant input: If you need to catch up on the history of eugenics, take a look at the recommended resource list. A good place to start is with the 10-minute clip from the Ken Burns PBS documentary, The Gene–an Intimate History, and the 3-minute trailer for No Más Bebés by Renee Tajima-Pena and Virginia Espino which documents non-consensual sterilizations of Mexican immigrants in California. In addition, the list has links to lesson plans, websites, videos, podcasts, articles, and books that delve into to the history of eugenics.
2. Results from the Workshop Survey: A summary of participant advice, concerns, and recommendations for the future. The entire set of survey responses is included.
3. Panelist slide decks:
   • Marnie Gelbart, Personal Genetics Education Project, pgEd: Gelbart’s session provided a brief overview of the history of eugenics, through a short clip from the Ken Burns documentary, The Gene: An Intimate History and pgEd’s curriculum on “Genetics, History, and the American Eugenics Movement”, which was reframed in the past 12 months, thanks to support from the NIH Science Education Partnership Award program. This lesson plan looks at the history of eugenics as a lens for examining recent advances in precision medicine and genome editing with an eye towards safeguarding against future injustices. pgEd has heard from educators across the country that this curriculum fills a content gap in the science classroom and gives teachers some of the tools required to feel confident in tackling a sensitive topic related to the misuse of genetic arguments. In the session, Gelbart presented pgEd’s recent work to reframe its curricula to center the people who fought back against racist and discriminatory policies and practices in genetics and medicine. This is part of pgEd’s larger efforts to truly integrate a broader spectrum of topics and include the experiences and voices of historically marginalized peoples into the biology classroom.
   • Gregory Davis, Bryn Mawr College: Davis shared a vignette about an approach he has taken with students interested in the history of eugenics who’ve taken his undergraduate course in the history of genetics and embryology, which he teaches in the Biology Department at Bryn Mawr College. He focused on the advantages and caveats of co- and re-discovering the history of one’s own institution with students by examining primary sources—in this case, papers presented by both geneticists and eugenicists at the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1921.
   • Michele Markstein, UMass Amherst: Markstein’s presentation focused on two approaches that she has used in teaching eugenics history to large undergraduate classes: (1) inviting her colleague, Dr. Laura Lovett from the History Department to guest lecture and (2) presenting the material herself in a blended approach that enables students to review scientific topics from earlier in the semester (e.g., pedigree analysis, DNA sequencing, SNP genotyping, pleiotropy, human evolution and migration) while exploring ethical considerations in deciding to eliminate a SNP associated with “pathogenic” body odor from the human population. At the end of this lecture, most students in her white-majority class learn that they likely have the “pathogenic” SNP. In Markstein’s experience, both approaches resonate especially well with Black and Latinx students.
   • John Novembre, University of Chicago: Novembre’s presentation focused on teaching about the interface of genetics and society in a graduate curriculum. The importance of this type of teaching is supported from the National Academy of Science’s recent report on Graduate Education for the 21st Century, and he shared some of the practices he and his colleagues have been experimenting with at the University of Chicago. These include activities around teaching about genetics and race, as well as the history of eugenics. He concluded with sharing some challenges to this work and highlighting the need for more resources and educational research in this area.

The James F. Crow Early Career Researcher Award recognizes outstanding achievements by students and recent PhDs presenting their work at the Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics (PEQG) Conference, which was part of TAGC Online in 2020. The 2020 winner and finalists for this prestigious PEQG award spoke in a high-profile session at the conference. Check out the recording below!

Winner

Carl Veller, Harvard University 

Finalists

In late 2019, Thomas Merritt approached the members of the Communication & Outreach Subcommittee of the GSA Early Career Leadership Program about submitting a proposal for The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC) 2020. The members of the subcommittee jumped at the opportunity, and a group of six submitted a full proposal, which the Genetics Society of America accepted for an in-person workshop. 

Then, COVID-19 happened, and GSA made the difficult choice to cancel the in-person conference. However, a few weeks later GSA announced that TAGC 2020 was pivoting to a fully virtual format. The conference would now have free registration, and each accepted workshop was offered a virtual workshop spot using Zoom. 

Once again, the Communication and Outreach Subcommittee team jumped at the new opportunity to showcase science communication and outreach to a virtual audience. We met weekly to discuss the new format and were thrilled to contact representatives from other Early Career Scientist Subcommittees, who graciously volunteered their time to serve as panelists. In addition to Communication and Outreach Subcommittee members, Amanda Shaver and Michelle Jonika joined us from the Career Development Subcommittee, and Malgorzata (Gosia) Gazda joined us from the Steering Subcommittee. 

The Science Communication: Challenges and Impact Workshop was the first featured workshop at The Allied Genetics Conference Online 2020. Our objective was to provide a diverse group of panelists who could discuss their specific experiences in science communication and outreach, as well as provide a space for scientists to discuss different approaches to science communication. 

The workshop consisted of three parts: a panel discussion, an activity with the participants, and a Q&A session. Our panelists opened the workshop by sharing their experiences with diverse platforms for science communication. While our panelists spoke, our participants engaged in a lively discussion using the Zoom chat feature to share their own recommendations, experiences, Twitter handles, and countries of origin. Some of our participants also live-tweeted the event using the #GSASciComm hashtag, and our co-moderators engaged with these Twitter conversations live during the workshop. 

After each panelist spoke about their experiences, we split the participants into breakout rooms with one panelist as the room moderator for a guided activity. Participants were provided with an excerpt from a scientific paper prior to the workshop for this activity, and spent 15 minutes discussing how to explain the excerpt to broader audiences.

Excerpt:  

“We then found that a short region of RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) from a bat coronavirus (BatCoV RaTG13)—which was previously detected in Rhinolophus affinis from Yunnan province—showed high sequence identity to 2019-nCoV. We carried out full-length sequencing on this RNA sample (GISAID accession number EPI_ISL_402131). Simplot analysis showed that 2019-nCoV was highly similar throughout the genome to RaTG13 (Fig. 1c), with an overall genome sequence identity of 96.2%. Using the aligned genome sequences of 2019-nCoV, RaTG13, SARS-CoV and previously reported bat SARSr-CoVs, no evidence for recombination events was detected in the genome of 2019-nCoV. Phylogenetic analysis of the full-length genome and the gene sequences of RdRp and spike (S) showed that—for all sequences—RaTG13 is the closest relative of 2019-nCoV and they form a distinct lineage from other SARSr-CoVs (Fig. 1d and Extended Data Fig. 2).”

Reference: Zhou, et al., 2020. Nature. 

Finally, we began the Q&A session with questions that our participants submitted during registration, then opened the floor for other questions from the participants. 

We are proud to report that the workshop was a great success! We brought together a total of 70 highly motivated participants from at least 15 different countries. Our participants eagerly engaged in the discussion by asking questions and sharing their own experiences, which continued on Twitter with the #GSASciComm hashtag. In fact, there was so much to discuss that the workshop extended for an hour longer than originally planned!

There are definitely improvements we would like to make for next time—and we would love for there to be a next time! Participants submitted valuable feedback and we will incorporate several of these suggestions in future plans and proposals, including longer breakout sessions (in a virtual format) and possibly including other languages in our breakout room sessions. 

Survey testimonials

“I really appreciated hearing how the panelists got started in science communication and hearing about all the different resources available (virtually none of which I’d heard of before).”

“The ‘face-to-face”’ of the break-out session was really nice. To actually have conversations with people ‘at a conference’ was really awesome, especially given the current climate.”

“Thanks to the organizers and panelists for this event! Planning a panel in a limited time during physical distancing is very challenging (since I am also involved in planning career development panels in my university). It was a well-planned and motivating panel. Sharing your experience was very valuable during these times. I would love to hear more about further workshops or journal clubs.”

“This was a great group of organizers and panelists that energized and inspired the participants.”

Check out the Communication and Outreach subcommittee’s SciComm Resource Guide. 

Engage with us on Twitter using the #GSASciComm hashtag.

From April 22–25, TAGC 2020 Online brought scientists from multiple research communities together to share their research and stay connected. Videos from select TAGC cross-community sessions are now available on YouTube. Those who weren’t able to participate in the conference in April, check out the recordings below!

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Speakers:

• Scott Barolo, University of Michigan Medical School: Inclusive PhD Admissions
• Andrea Darby, Cornell University: The Diversity Preview Weekend
• Gary McDowell, Lightoller LLC: World’s for Diversity and Inclusion
• Jennifer Alexander, Fox Chase Cancer Center: The Inclusion of Dietary Practices in Genetics Research
• Crystal Tsosie, Turtle Mountain Community College: Building an Indigenous Bio Bank

Genetic Technology in Practice

Speakers:

• Kenneth Bruno, Zymergen Inc.: Fungal Genetics and Automated Strain Engineering
• Eli Rodgers-Melnick, Corteva Agriscience: Making the Most of our Molecules
• Celia Payne, Dupont: Development of Robust Yeast Strains for the Corn-Ethanol Industry
• Julia Alterman, Atalanta Therapeutics: Divalent siRNA Scaffold for Robust Gene Modulation in the Central Nervous System
• Janis Weeks, InVivo Biosystems: Cutting Edge Genome Editing and Phenotyping Tools

COVID-19 Response from the NSF and NIH (Q&A)

NSF Speakers:

• Joanne Tornow, Assistant Director Biological Services
• Matt Olson, Program Director, Division of Environmental Biology
• Manju Hingorani, Program Director, Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences

NIH Speakers:

• Michael Lauer, Director, Office of Extramural Research
• Jodi Black, Deputy Director, Office of Extramural Research

Education

Speakers:

• Julie Hall, Lincoln Memorial University: The Impact of Collaborative Instruction on Molecular Genetics and Mammalogy Students
• Rochelle Tractenberg, Georgetown University: Promoting Learning and Learner-Centered Teaching of Genetics and Bioinformatics
• Jason Williams, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory: The Genomics Education Alliance: Scalable, Sustainable Infrastructure for CUREs
• Rebecca Burgess, Stevenson University: Crowd-Sourcing CRISPR to Investigate the Impact of Chromatin Environment on Double-Strand Break Repair
• Teresa Lee, Emory University: The Pipeline CURE: A Curriculum Wide-Approach to Introduce Students to Research
• Luke Ziegler, North Hennepin Community College: Performance Enhanced Biology

Direct Collaborations: Model Organism Researchers and Clinicians

Speakers:

• Ada Hamosh, Johns Hopkins University: The Essential Role of Model Organisms for Functional Studies of Genes and Variants Linked to Human Diseases: Part 1, Part 2
• Hugo Bellen, Baylor College of Medicine, Solving Difficult to Diagnose Diseases using Flies and Zebrafish
• Philip Hieter, University of British Columbia: The Canadian National Network of Clinician and Model Scientists: Rare Diseases: Models and Mechanisms
• Lauryl Nutter, The Center for Phenogenomics: Leveraging the IMPC in Collaborative Research
• Andy Golden, Laboratory of Biochemistry and Genetics: Modeling Rare and Neglected Human Diseased in C.elegans
• Alex Parker, University of Montreal: A Model Organism-based Drug Discovery Pipeline for ALS
• Shinya Yamamoto, Baylor College of Medicine: Strategies and Resources to Facilitate Collaborations between Clinicians and Model Organism Researchers on a Global Scale

Today it’s easy to take for granted that geneticists can identify a mutation, find its gene, and map it to the expressed protein. But just a few decades ago, this problem remained a thorny one. Welcome Bender of Harvard Medical School—with his work teasing out the function of the bithorax complex in Drosophila—made key advances in this area. For the development of positional cloning approaches and his creative, in-depth exploration of the function of the bithorax complex, Bender has received the Genetics Society of America’s 2020 Edward Novitski Prize for extraordinary creativity and intellectual ingenuity in solving significant problems in genetics research.

“Welcome Bender opened up the fields of developmental and disease genetics for years to come,” says Mark Peifer of the University of North Carolina, Bender’s former graduate student and one of the scientists who nominated him for the award. “Working in Dave Hogness’s lab, where molecular biology was first applied to Drosophila, Welcome invented a simple but conceptually ingenious idea for positional cloning: Look for a clone in the rough region of the genome and use this as a toehold. Then isolate a larger genomic region overlapping this original clone and use the most distal sequences in that region to iteratively repeat the process.”

Bender’s interest in Drosophila genetics started during his final year as a Harvard undergraduate, which he spent at the MRC Laboratory, working down the hall from Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner. At the time, Crick was excited about fruit flies and the notion of one-band, one-gene, Bender recalls. “When I then began graduate work, I, I imagined that I was going to figure out how to do a transformation into fruit flies.” That idea crashed and burned, he notes. “I was ahead of my time in ideas and behind my time in capabilities.”

Bender completed his PhD at Caltech with Norman Davidson while focusing on RNA tumor viruses, but his interest in Drosophila genetics continued. For his postdoc, he chose to work on recombinant DNA in fruit flies with David Hogness at Stanford. At the time, he says, the biggest challenge was getting access to interesting genes with a history, such as the rosy locus studied by Art Chovnick or the bithorax complex studied by Ed Lewis.

When he started working on positional cloning in the Hogness lab, Bender thought he could divide the Drosophila genome into restriction fragments and separate them with 2-D gel electrophoresis, comparing wild-type fly strains with those that had deletions in an interesting region. “It was a disaster,” Bender says. “At the time we didn’t appreciate that there were so many mobile elements in flies and that every strain had a distinct collection of them.” Plan B involved “walking” along a chromosome with overlapping recombinant clones. (It was a close collaboration with Pierre Spierer, another postdoc.) The walk quickly bumped into a mobile element, which had also inserted into many other places in the genome. This repeat blocked the recovery of a unique overlap. That’s where using different genetic libraries from distinct Drosophila strains—one developed by Elliot Meyerowitz in the Hogness lab and another developed by Joyce Lauer in the Maniatis lab—proved fruitful. The mobile element blockage in one library was absent in the other. Bender also harnessed his knowledge of electron microscopy with nucleic acids, a technique he’d learned in Davidson’s lab. Because they could use heteroduplexing to follow overlaps between two clones, they could unravel tricky genetic problems, including a rearrangement within the bithorax complex that would have been difficult to identify by other methods.

After Bender had launched his own lab at Harvard Medical School, he, Peifer and postdoc François Karch published an influential 1987 review article in Genes & Development outlining the layout and logic of the bithorax complex. “The notion was that the bithorax complex is made up of a series of domains of DNA segments, each of which is responsible for the regulation of a different segment. It’s not that you turn on a gene everywhere in a segment,” he says. Instead each domain is a group of cis regulatory elements that elaborate a pattern in time and space of the small number of transcription factors encoded within the complex. “So the pattern gets richer as you go further back in the animal.” Bender’s lab would then validate this model, initially by characterizing many spontaneous and induced mutations from Ed Lewis’ collection.

Bender’s team and many other labs used the P element to make transgenic flies, and many of these P element insertions landed within the bithorax complex. P elements carrying a reporter gene, like beta galactosidase, were restricted in their expression to particular segments, depending on the position of the insertion within the complex. By following gene expression patterns, they could outline the layout and logic of this complex regulatory network. P elements could also be mobilized by the P transposase, leaving a double stranded break at the insertion site. Bill Engels had shown that such breaks could be used for gene conversion. The Bender lab used that strategy to patch in sequences of interest, a strategy that gave them CRISPR-like gene editing capabilities years before CRISPR was developed. This permitted a series of elegant experiments, many in collaboration with Karch’s group at the University of Geneva.

Bender’s team has gone on to use these tools to map the topology of the bithorax complex, looking at the way that the Polycomb system of repression restricts access to silenced genes. “Bender envisioned that chromosomal structure or chromosomal domains played a fundamental role in the regulation of the BX-C cluster more than a decade before the proposed histone code hypothesis,” adds Karch, who also nominated Bender for the award.

Bender takes a focused research approach, modeled after Ed Lewis. He says, “I think you want to find a problem, a gene, where you have a lot of information on a small amount of biology and grind down until you’re sure you understand it.”

The Edward Novitski Prize recognizes an extraordinary level of creativity and intellectual ingenuity in the solution of significant problems in genetics research. The prize honors scientific achievement that stands out from other innovative work, that is deeply impressive to creative masters in the field, and that solves a difficult problem in genetics. It also recognizes the beautiful and intellectually ingenious experimental design and execution involved in genetics scientific discovery. Bender will accept the award at TAGC 2020 Online.

The next nomination period will open in September 2020. 

GSA’s Executive Director explains why and how we’re taking TAGC 2020 virtual.

For several years, we at GSA have been planning The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC), originally set for DC in late April 2020. After a successful inaugural meeting in 2016, organizers and GSA staff sought to bring communities together by focusing on scientific themes that spanned research organisms and disciplines. 

And then came COVID-19.

Because of the pandemic, we made the decision in mid-March to cancel the in-person meeting. While this was clearly the right call, it inevitably meant tremendous loss for our communities. 

Conference organizers, committee members, and staff had invested countless hours designing schedules, reviewing abstracts, planning professional development programs, negotiating contracts, and a thousand other tasks to ensure that attendees would have an inspiring, inspired experience at TAGC. Presenters—most of them early career scientists—had worked hard and were excited to share their discoveries. Workshop organizers were eager to engage with attentive audiences. Exhibitors and sponsors had offered travel awards, support for caregiver grants, and resources to help underrepresented groups attend the meeting. Journal editors were ready to field questions from those trying to learn the ins-and-outs of publishing. And above all, more than 3,000 attendees were excited to meet colleagues, make connections, listen, learn, and share. 

Even as the decision to cancel the in-person meeting was being discussed, we started wondering: Could we move TAGC online? Was there any way to rescue some of the scientific and career value of the meeting?

In the course of just a few weeks, so much has changed. Many in our communities are juggling working from home, teaching online, childcare and homeschooling, figuring out lab operations, and new ways of communicating and collaborating—all amid the usual stressors like writing grants or submitting manuscripts. Some are dealing with the isolation of both living and working at home alone. Some of us—and our families and friends—may work in healthcare settings or interact with the public on the front lines of the pandemic. Others are dealing with illness or sick family members. Most are concerned with ways to help. It can be hard to find focus and time. It is impossible to find a sense of normalcy.

Despite the uncertainty in the world and the upheaval in our lives, the GSA Board and TAGC community leaders recognized that communicating science and making scientific connections is even more important right now than ever. 

Discovery must continue, and so must we.

It is in that spirit that we’re taking TAGC 2020 to a virtual format. Just like the original in-person conference, cross-community thematic sessions will alternate with community-specific sessions dedicated to particular model organisms and disciplines. We’ll have keynotes as well as The Gruber Prize in Genetics lecture. Talks and posters will be presented in a virtual and interactive format. In the weeks immediately following TAGC 2020, we’ll help organizers to host their Workshop Series online.

We’re happy to let you know that we’re making this virtual meeting free for registrants. Even people who weren’t originally signed up for TAGC 2020 can register to attend virtually. Why free? Given the circumstances, the uncertainty, and the short timeline we have for completely redesigning the meeting, we consider TAGC Online to be a big and exciting experiment. Despite the financial losses GSA will incur, we can’t ask our community to pay fees for such an experiment. We also recognize that many attendees will no longer be able to attend every session in the way they would have at the in-person meeting and that it is much harder for people to make firm plans and commitments in advance. We are grateful to have some support from sponsors and exhibitors that will help offset the cost; if your organization wishes to support our efforts, I encourage you to contact development@genetics-gsa.org. 

How will this virtual conference work?

The original schedule has been compressed and adjusted to allow for participation across US time zones and some international ones. We’ll still have a live welcome to the conference, talks will be live, and session chairs will moderate their sessions, all via Zoom. We’ll have live technical support to help things run smoothly. Most live sessions will be recorded and available for viewing by registrants for 30 days after the event. 

Poster presenters will upload their poster PDF and optional video/audio walkthrough for the meeting, and in the week following the meeting they will join live poster discussion sessions. GSA will also provide community and theme-specific Slack channels to encourage additional discussion of all sessions and to allow those with related interests to connect. Most of the attendee-organized workshops will be held via Zoom in the weeks following the poster sessions. 

Even though the conference is free to attend, all participants and presenters must register for TAGC 2020 Online, and each person will need to log in to the TAGC program planner/meeting app to view live sessions or recordings.

Join our experiment!

Will there be technical challenges? Probably. That’s to be expected with the worldwide volume of online interactions these days and the short timeframe for planning.

But when we encounter hiccups, support staff and presenters will adapt quickly to keep things moving. We’ll test in advance, make contingency plans, and provide each presenter with instructions. We’ll let attendees know device and internet requirements for optimal viewing and engagement. The biggest way attendees and speakers can help the meeting run smoothly is by carefully reading and following the technical instructions that we’ll send soon. And of course, please be patient if things don’t go according to plan!

Although some parts of the original program weren’t able to be ported to an online version at this time, we hope to be able to host a greater variety of online programs in the future, when we have more time to plan. 

We’ll be opening registration next week. Please join us at TAGC 2020 Online, whether it’s for one talk or the entire conference, and help spread the word. It wouldn’t be the same without you.

Learn more about TAGC Online ≫ 

Questions? Email GSAConferences@genetics-gsa.org.

The Victoria Finnerty Travel Award supports travel costs for undergraduate GSA members who are engaged in research to attend the Annual Drosophila Research Conference, which was to be part of TAGC in 2020. Due to TAGC moving to an online format, 2020 awardees will instead present their work virtually at TAGC Online.

Victoria Finnerty, who died in February 2011, was a long-time member of the Genetics Society of America and served the Drosophila community and the genetics community at large in many capacities. A wonderful geneticist, Vickie’s ground-breaking work as a graduate student used high-resolution recombination analysis to dissect gene structure. This set the stage for a 35-year career in which she excelled as a gifted teacher as well as research scientist. Vickie was also a wise and compassionate mentor and teacher for whom interactions with her students was a constant joy. She constantly sought new ways to engage undergraduates in their genetics courses and in research; this travel fellowship fund continues Vickie’s stellar example.

Brooke Allen, University of Detroit Mercy

My work studies how yorkie facilitates cell survival during larval eye development of Drosophila melanogaster.

Corinne Croslyn, University of Evansville

My work investigates Asteroid, a predicted nuclease, in Drosophila oogenesis and DNA repair.

Dalia Fainberg, CUNY Baruch College

We use high resolution confocal microscopy to map the somatic muscles of the head in Drosophila, and we compare the morphology of head muscles in wild-type and mutant genetic backgrounds using fluorescent transgenes and antibodies.

Nate Fischer, Marquette University

I am investigating the role of the drop-dead gene in the formation of the cuticle in Drosophila larvae.

Nicole Folan, College of the Holy Cross

I research a gene, pickpocket 29 (ppk29), that encodes for a subunit of a DEG/ENaC, a non-voltage-gated sodium channel, and investigate its expression and function in both neurons and glia throughout the nervous system.

Jillian Gomez, University of Tampa

I am characterizing a X-linked mutation that causes female sterility in fruit flies.

Isabella Hanesworth, Mercy College

Our research aims to idenitify telomere regulating genes in Drosophila melanogaster.

Jordyn Moaton, University of Missouri – Columbia

The purpose of my project is to study the underlying genetic mechanisms of starvation resistance using Drosophila melanogaster as a model.

Anthony Ruiz, Bemidji State University

My work aims to understand how carbohydrate regulation through genetic and environmental backgrounds.

Joshua Sikder, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

I am analyzing the role that tandem duplication play in the evolution of Drosophila.

Efren Silva, University of Houston

We are studying P-elements in dysgenic ovaries of fruit flies to uncover the genetic architecture of transposition.

Marta Stetsiv, Kansas State University

NUAK and interacting proteins are implicated in aggregation phenotypes associated with muscle defects in Drosophila.

Anastasia Welch, Rhode Island College

My research involves visualizing genetic modifiers of aggregation in a Drosophila model of ALS.

Joey Wong, University of California, Santa Cruz

My project strives to assess the role of the p3 peptide, an alternative fragment made in the amyloid precursor protein metabolic pathway, in Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis.

Last week, the GSA Board of Directors cancelled The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC), an event we had all been eagerly anticipating. It was a heartbreaking end to four years of work and planning by many people across our community. 

Although painful, the decision was clearly the socially responsible thing to do. The Board voted unanimously to cancel because there was a clear health risk, not only to our attendees but to the broader public. Last Thursday—just four days ago—there were more than 1,600 cases reported in the US and more than 128,000 worldwide. Today, there are more than 3,600 cases reported in the US and more than 175,000 worldwide.

Right now we are focused on working with the community organizing committees to rescue at least some portion of the program using virtual platforms. It will not be the same as holding TAGC in person, but it is our best option under the circumstances.

We are mindful that cancelling a meeting imposes burdens. We took time to evaluate the incoming information and make a considered choice. Many early career scientists were counting on this opportunity to present their work. The huge potential for TAGC to accelerate science and foster new collaborations was at stake. We knew that without TAGC, some of our communities would have to wait 1-2 years for their next community meeting. Some of us had already secured visas, made travel plans, organized childcare, scheduled lab reunions, and planned meetups with friends and colleagues. 

We initially planned to make a decision one month before the meeting was to be held. Unfortunately, the pandemic evolved so rapidly that cancelling the meeting became urgent. The risks vs benefits changed in a flash, so on Friday, we announced the decision to cancel TAGC to our communities and attendees.

Now, just a few days later, many of us are in the difficult position of figuring out how to shut down our research labs. We are suddenly tasked with designing online lab courses. We are trying to work from home while simultaneously caring for children unable to go to school or daycare. We are worrying about setbacks in tenure, grant, and job applications. Not to mention that we’re all worried about the health of colleagues, students, family members and friends—as well as our own health. 

Thoughts about conferences we may or may not have been able to attend are, this week, the least of all our concerns.

We’re fortunate that the GSA community is strong and connected. We can and will help each other. As challenging as the situation is, it is also an opportunity to get creative as we help each other muddle through. We’ve already had a member suggest that we share online genetics teaching strategies on the GSA website. Please get in touch with GSA (society@genetics-gsa.org) if you want to reach our members. Maybe you have a question to ask the community, maybe you have a resource to share, maybe you have a message or some advice. I’d also like to remind those with children now at home that the Conference Childcare Committee has created a “Parents in Science” Slack channel where you can share your ideas. You can join it here.

As we face this uncharted territory together, we urge you to follow the advice of public health authorities to keep yourself and those around you safe. As scientists, we’re in a position to really understand the scope of the situation facing us—and to help the public understand it better, too. Reducing disease spread and the associated burden on our healthcare systems requires us all to be safety- and community-minded. Think of it like pulling off to the side of the road to let the ambulance and fire truck go by. It’s inspiring when everyone pulls together to do the right thing for the community as a whole.

We hope to see you at future conferences when it is once again safe to hold them.

Update, March 25: Stay tuned for an announcement this week about the new virtual format of TAGC 2020 Online!

Get to know the TAGC 2020 Keynote Speakers through our interview series.

Cassandra Extavour

Cassandra Extavour obtained an Honors BSc at the University of Toronto with a specialist in Molecular Genetics and Molecular Biology. She obtained her PhD with Antonio Garcia Bellido at the Severo Ochoa Center for Molecular Biology at the Autonomous University of Madrid. She performed postdoctoral work first with Michalis Averof at the Institute for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology in Crete, Greece, and subsequently with Michael Akam at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge she received a BBSRC Research Grant and became a Research Associate in the Department of Zoology. In 2007, she established her independent laboratory as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, where she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2011 and to Full Professor in 2014. She has received numerous honors and awards and has been nominated for the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize and the Harvard Graduate Women in Science and Engineering Mentoring Award. The Extavour laboratory is interested in understanding early embryonic development, the genes that control this development, the evolutionary origins of these genes, and how their functions have changed over evolutionary time.

What research are you most excited about right now, and why?

I’m excited about research in genetics that tries to bring together our understanding of the function and evolution of genetic control systems across multiple scales of biological organization. An example might be the genetic circuits that control the shape of cells within a multicellular group—and how those individual cell shapes get connected and propagated to result in changes in the shape of the whole group of cells. Another example is investigating how the action of individual genes in a gene regulatory network is parallelled across branches of the evolutionary tree of life—and how genetic regulatory interactions in one lineage of the tree of life can be used to predict how interactions work in other lineages. 

I’m interested in these cross-scale studies because I think this is the only way we’re going to move toward a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of these genetic systems; the one-by-one, gene-by-gene, cell-by-cell approach is critical, but it can’t be the only approach. It was so fruitful for the last half of the last century, but now systems-level, global genomic-level, and population-level data are becoming possible to generate and analyze, which can move us beyond what was possible last century.

What do you like about working with flies and other insects?

There is no better genetic manipulation system in an animal than in Drosophila melanogaster. No other animal can be manipulated genetically with the same precision and control, so for someone who wants to work on the genetic control of obligately multicellular systems, it’s the best model.

From a comparative evolutionary point of view, the genus Drosophila is large as far as insects go. It’s as old as many other genera, but it’s experienced a lot of rapid radiation. It has several thousand species, and at least a thousand of those evolved, we think, from a last common ancestor within the last few tens of million years ago, which is extremely quickly. There is a huge amount of species diversity, genetic diversity, and morphological diversity ranging from very recent evolutionary timescales to much older evolutionary timescales just within the genus Drosophila, which is also very appealing to me.

Is there anything about yourself or the field that made you feel like you didn’t belong in science? What would you say to early career scientists struggling with the same feeling?

Absolutely: being a woman in a male-dominated field, being black in a white-dominated field, being gay in a heteronormative-dominated field. I feel like I belong, but on a daily basis, I’m reminded that not everybody thinks that.

What I would say to early career scientists is that feeling fascinated by genetics and wanting to be a geneticist means that you belong in genetics—but it’s a reality that not everyone you encounter in your career is going to share that view. Academia—scholarly research of any kind, including science—is a very conservative profession with narrow definitions of success, belonging, and what it takes to participate in and contribute to the field.

What I recommend to early career researchers is that they work on developing and strengthening as many different resources as they can in their lives to remind them that they have a right to do and pursue whatever they want to—because they may not always find that support within the genetics field.

TAGC aims to foster collaboration between communities and disciplines. Can you give an example of a collaboration that really helped your work?

In the last few years, we wanted to expand beyond Drosophila melanogaster into looking at the biology and genetics of Drosophila species endemic to the Hawaiian islands. What was critical to the success of that work was establishing great collaborations with scientists working in Hawaii who knew the ecology and the biology of the animals and plants that are native to those island systems and who were willing share their knowledge with us, helping us understand the ecological context of these files. That’s the only way—not only to literally find and catch the flies so you can study them—but to make sense of the biology and genetics of those flies. When you want to branch into new areas of zoology and explore new habitats in the world, collaborations with people who know the biology give you context to understand the genetics you’re interested in. So that’s been a very successful collaboration, and we’re very grateful to Karl Magnacca, Steve Montgomery, Ken Kaneshiro, and Don Price. They’ve been working with these flies in Hawaii for many years, and they were absolutely critical to our ability to learn about them.

Another successful collaboration, not in genetics, but on early development and embryology in a gene-free context was with applied mathematicians Chris Rycroft and Jordan Hoffmann in our engineering school at Harvard. They helped us apply mathematical modeling to the behavior of nuclei in early embryos to give us new hypotheses to test with molecular and genetic tools about how these embryos put themselves together.

Select Publications from the Extavour Lab

Bacterial contribution to genesis of the novel germ line determinant oskar
Blondel L, Jones TEM, Extavour CG
Elife. 2020 Feb 24;9. pii: e45539. doi: 10.7554/eLife.45539

Absence of a Faster-X Effect in Beetles (Tribolium, Coleoptera)
Whittle CA, Kulkarni A, Extavour CG
G3 (Bethesda). 2020 Jan 27. pii: g3.401074.2020. doi: 10.1534/g3.120.401074

Topology-driven analysis of protein-protein interaction networks detects functional genetic modules regulating reproductive capacity
Kumar T, Blondel L,  Extavour CG
bioRxiv.  doi: 10.1101/852897 (preprint posted November 30, 2019)

Insect egg size and shape evolve with ecology but not developmental rate
Church SH, Donoughe S, de Medeiros BAS, Extavour CG
Nature. 2019 Jul;571(7763):58-62. doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-1302-4

Reproductive Capacity Evolves in Response to Ecology through Common Changes in Cell Number in Hawaiian Drosophila
Sarikaya DP, Church SH, Lagomarsino LP, Magnacca KN, Montgomery SL, Price DK, Kaneshiro KY, Extavour CG
Curr Biol. 2019 Jun 3;29(11):1877-1884.e6. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.04.063

Get to know the TAGC 2020 Keynote Speakers through our interview series.

Jon R. Lorsch

Jon R. Lorsch is the director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). In this position, Lorsch oversees the Institute’s $2.9​ billion budget, which supports basic research that increases understanding of biological processes and lays the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. A leader in RNA biology, Lorsch studies the initiation of translation, a major step in controlling how genes are expressed. When this process goes awry, viral infection, neurodegenerative diseases and cancer can result. To dissect the mechanics of translation initiation, Lorsch and collaborators developed a yeast-based system and a wide variety of biochemical and biophysical methods. Lorsch continues this research as a tenured investigator in the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

What research are you most excited about right now, and why?

That’s a broad question! If I had to single out one area, I’d say that studies of regeneration in different organisms are extremely exciting—asking how organisms regenerate entire limbs, organs, or body plans as adults. It’s not something my lab works on, but I find it very interesting.

What do you like about working with yeast?

You can grow a lot of them, which is very helpful for a biochemist.

Is there anything about yourself or the field that made you feel like you didn’t belong in science? What would you say to early career scientists struggling with the same feeling?

I think imposter syndrome is a very common feeling that many—maybe even most—people have, and it doesn’t just happen in science. I think the main thing is to remind yourself that you do belong in science. Keep following what your passion is, and figure out how to move forward in the way that works best for you.

TAGC aims to foster collaboration between communities and disciplines. Can you give an example of a collaboration that really helped your work?

I’ve collaborated with Alan Hinnebusch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for 20 years and continue to do so today. It has absolutely been one of the highlights of my career. Alan is a world-renowned yeast geneticist. Bridging the gap between the in vivo side using his yeast genetic expertise and the in vitro biochemistry we can do has proven extremely rewarding in terms of understanding the mechanisms involved in eukaryotic translation initiation.