Stylianos Antonarakis’ talk focuses on the human genome. Every time a human is created, the genome is copied, with one tiny mistake – the mistake that differentiates them, he tells us and the numbers are stunning: all of us are 99.1% identical, because we belong to the same species, homo sapiens sapiens and the 0.9% that is different is what creates the variability that we have as a species – a difference that is needed, because it provides us with the ability to adapt and to evolve. The different degrees of variability create disorders or predisposition for disorders. Genetic medicine is what we would call a personified medicine, given that despite the fact that we know very little about the human genome so far, the doctors can reach various diagnoses. Quoting Shakespeare’s “What is past is prologue” he leaves us with a lot to think about for the future of medicine.

Stylianos E. Antonarakis is currently Professor and Chairman of Genetic Medicine at the Univ. of Geneva Medical School, President of HUGO, and the founding director of iGE3 (institute of Genetics and Genomics of Geneva). He received his MD(1975) and DSc(1982) from the University of Athens Medical School. He is a medical, molecular, human geneticist, physician-scientist.He joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University in 1983 and rose to full professor of Pediatric Genetics, Biology and Medicine in 1990. He has published more than 660 papers and he is listed as one of the highly cited scientists by the ISI institute with more than 51,000 citations. He received numerous awards including the commander of the Order of Phoenix medal from the Hellenic Democracy(2007). Some of his current interests and research projects are the functional analysis of the genome, effect of human genetic variation to phenotypic variation, and the molecular pathogenesis of trisomy 21 & polygenic phenotypes.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx