Goldfish Learn To Drive

SAEY: 
Do you envision a time when we will be able to study and 
interpret these bigger changes?
GREEN: 
I absolutely envision a time where people will get 
their complete genome sequenced end to end as part of their 
medical care, and maybe even at birth. I don’t think we’re 
there yet. But I truly believe that we will want that infor-
mation as part of medical management. And I fully believe 
that technologies will become available and will be inexpen-
sive enough to make it worthwhile. But those predictions 
are going to have to be based on evidence that indeed that’s
feasible and valuable. 
What’s next?
SAEY:
So where do we go from here? What does the National 
Human Genome Research Institute do now that research-
ers have generated end-to-end sequences of every human
chromosome?
GREEN: 
We recently finished a two-and-a-half-year strategic 
planning process to ask that very question for this coming 
decade. It was actually an overwhelming exercise because there 
were so many good ideas. We published these in Nature — our 
2020 strategic vision. Some of it [is] applications of genomics 
to medicine. Of course, everybody’s going to be excited about 
that. But there are many other forefronts of genomics that are 
just as exciting. 
We still don’t have the perfect technologies that we can 
deploy anywhere in the world in any health setting, any medi-
cal study, that will get us end-to-end sequencing. We need
better and cheaper technologies for letting us read human 
genome sequences inexpensively in clinical settings. We 
need complete end-to-end interpretation of every base of the 
human genome. We need to know not just about the genes, we 
need to know about all these noncoding regions. We need to 
understand every human variant that we can find in the world 
population. And we need to know: Is that variant biologically 
silent? Is it biologically relevant? Is it medically relevant? If 
it’s medically relevant, what’s the action that should be taken? 
That starts to point us to understanding the genomic basis of 
disease and also to think about how can we use information 
about genomic variation in the practice of medicine.
Also, we will continue to think about the implications of 
these genomic advances to society. How are we going to make