Why We Should Care About Genetics

I went tonight to the first in a year long series of lectures/discussions on genetics sponsored by the Illinois Humanities Council. This lecture, Why We Should Care About Genetics, was meant to start the conversation. It was interactive, we were given a clicker to instantly answer questions so they could be tabulated and compared to other peoples answers. The talk featured a political scientist who studied scientific literacy (who by the way is yet another Spartan), a geneticist from Northwestern who talked about why genetics is important and some possible issues with genetic research, and an interpretive dancer who talked about the dance project that she created about genetics and how the arts might be used to bring more people into the conversation about genetics. THe program was very engaging and while it went 2 hours, it could have very easily gone much longer. A quiz that had been given to the general public in 9 countries was given the the audience and about twice as many of the audience passed the test then the general public. A member of the audience did make a point however, that the results are probably skewed because the people that came to the talk were interested in the subject and so had a higher level of knowledge. While that may be true, it was good to be around a group of people that aren't willfully ignorant.