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Food For Thought: Final Report from the AGBT Ag Meeting

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Friends and foes
Zernike’s book introduces a large cast of characters (mostly men). Some of the men were friends to Hopkins, some were enemies, and some wore both hats. Another character in the book is unconscious bias. Zernike told be that the idea for her book came about in 2018. Hopkins was retiring from MIT and wondering what to do with the notebooks she had kept during her career. Zernike recalled that the #MeToo movement was in its heyday. But she wanted to highlight a different kind of discrimination—not necessarily related to sexual assault. And she wanted to give readers a sense of what it feels like to face unconscious bias. What rises to the top of the discrimination Hopkins experienced, and the extraordinary story of how she fought against it, is Hopkins’s dedication to a discipline that she loved. She slept, ate, and breathed science. Not because she had to and not because she wanted promotion. But because she loved it—it was her lifeblood. Although Hopkins is a pioneer, she was not the first to call out the unequal treatment of women in science. Indeed, some 25 years earlier, in 1974, a group of women led by Alice Huang, professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School, analyzed data based on a survey sent to the members of the American Society for Microbiology. In the report, Huang and her coauthors wrote, “The lack of encouragement and self-confidence leading to isolation, which then leads to lack of recognition, is a vicious circle that must be broken for the woman professional.” Nancy Hopkins broke that vicious circle on the MIT campus. One can only hope that more progress has been made over the past 24 years. However, recent data suggest that problems persist. For example, a 2019 study indicates that in the United States, women made up only 34% of those employed in STEM occupations. So, challenges remain, despite the progress secured by Hopkins, Huang, and many others. The Exceptions serves as inspiration to pick up where they left off. For more on this story, please watch this interview with Kate Zernike, author of The Exceptions, conducted during the Rosalind Franklin Society Annual meeting last December.Book Review: The Exceptions
March, according to one poet, is the month of expectation—a time of uncertainty, prognostication, and joyful (if guarded) anticipation. Here at GEN, we concur. Our March issue is all about expectation. It captures the hopefulness that prevailed at AGBT 2023, an event that heralded the latest developments in next-generation sequencing, single-cell genomics, and spatial biology, justifying presentiments of more complete genomes and pangenomes. Our March issue also describes how things new and wondrous are unfolding in RNA therapeutics, cancer genomics, epigenetics, viral vector manufacturing, and single-cell proteomics. For example, in RNA therapeutics, new developments include circular RNA and self-replicating RNA. And in epigenetics, workflows are emerging that can sequence genetic and epigenetic bases at once. For more, read March GEN. (We will add, however, that it reports that stem cell transplantation may become a first-line therapy for multiple sclerosis—which is fitting, since March is multiple sclerosis awareness month.)