GENEtics Page 1

MAY-JUNE 2008

Volume 5, Number 2

9650 Rockville Pike

Bethesda, MD 20814-3998

Tel: (301) 634-7300

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www.genetics-gsa.org

From the President's desk:

Dialogues and Challenges
for the GSA

Genetics continues to be one of the most rapidly evolving sciences, with

new methods bringing deeper insights every year. This keeps things
exciting in our laboratories, but poses challenges. We must keep abreast
of the new techniques and recognize the relationship of the novel findings
to our research. What are some of these challenges, and how should we
meet them?

A big challenge presented by the constant influx of new techniques and insights concerns our

teaching of genetics. What should we teach from year to year? Our courses have a finite number of
lectures introduction of new material must be balanced by deletion or condensation of material
we thought important the year before. How do we find the balance between the fantastic new
techniques and the insights of genomics and the classical approaches and lessons that have served
us so well? I hope we avoid condensing it all into pretty PowerPoint shows that touch on many
things but never delve rigorously into the questions and analyses. The strength of genetics is the
depth of analysis it can provide, and that is what students should take away from a course.

Unfortunately, I find that many of the textbooks seem to go the other route, adding new chapters

on genomics and condensing and deleting much substance. Often what remains is trivialized, more
appropriate for high school biology than a college-level course in genetics. I once asked a text-
book editor about a change involving chromosome abnormalities, and I was told "people found
this subject matter too confusing". But why not make the textbooks modular? It would be nice to
have a custom-tailored textbook where everyone would order the introductory chapters, but then
choose other chapters from a variety of choices. This may be necessary for us to meet the
challenge of rapid change in our teaching.

The rapid progress in our field also poses a challenge for our Society. How can we represent a

growing number of subfields and trends in genetics? How can we show people who approach
questions in very different ways to recognize that they belong to the same discipline, and feel the
need to belong to and support the same professional society? While the GSA has long connected to
geneticists working with model organisms, the more computationally oriented geneticists, pursuing
genomic or systems approaches, may not see themselves allied with those of us performing crosses
and using epistasis and series of alleles, to ask questions about gene function and pathways. But

Published three times a year and distributed
by The Genetics Society of America

OFFICERS
Trudi M. Schüpbach, President
Fred Winston, Vice-President
Allan C. Spradling, Past-President
Trudy F. Mackay, Treasurer
James E. Haber, Secretary
Elizabeth W. Jones, GENETICS, Editor-in-Chief

BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Victor R. Ambros, Kathryn M. Barton, Nancy M. Bonini, Sally A. Camper,
Charles H. Langley, Susan T. Lovett, Tim Schedl, Michael P. Snyder,
Mariana F. Wolfner

WEB CONTENT EDITOR
Jeff J. Sekelsky

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND EDITOR
Elaine Strass

MANAGING EDITOR
Phyllis R. Edelman

Continued on page 18