Scientific meeting at Bilkent University was featured in Nature Genetics

Gokce A Toruner, MD, PhD

"Anatolia boasts over 9,000 years of complex and continuous civilization and stands at the point connecting Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Modern Turkey offers great opportunities for understanding the human genome, with its excellent universities and clinics serving a large, diverse population of large families, relatively high consanguinity, and many local populations of long duration.” is the opening sentences of the editorial in August 2009 issue of Nature Genetics.

The focus of the editorial is The Mediterranean Medical Genetics Meeting 2009 at Bilkent University, Ankara, which was organized by Turkish Society of Medical Genetics and European Society of Human Genetics. In their letter, the organizers -Tayfun Ozcelik (Turkey), Koulis Yannoukakos (Greece), Mojen Kanaan (Palestine), Karen Avraham (Israel)- the organizers stated that the aim of the meeting was “to promote peace through international scientific cooperation and advance the life sciences through programs reflecting the concepts and high-resolution approaches of modern genomics research."

According to the Nature Genetics editorial, the meeting met the stated aims and is a huge success. The abstract of the editorial states that "[the meeting] reaffirmed the commitment of a pragmatic group of scientifically excellent researchers to local problem solving and to the vision of borderless global collaboration in human genomics."

During the meeting, current research in various areas of human genetics such as genome architecture and regulation, cancer genetics, neurogenetics clinical genetics, dysmorphology and genomics were discussed. Issues like education, collaboration, diagnostic services and genetic counseling in medical genetics and ethics were also the subject matters of the sessions. In addition, an official two day European Society of Human Genetics education course entitled as “Medical genetics and genomic analysis in isolated and consanguineous populations” was held during the course of the meeting

We commend the local organizing committee in Turkey for promoting the ideals of Kemal Ataturk which are reflected in his sayings of  "Peace at home, peace at world” and “Our true guide in life in Science". We hope and believe peace through science is a viable and feasable option in the troubled region where Turkey is located.