Interviewer: A glimpse into the history of the Utah Genome Project, up next on The Scope.
Announcer: Examining the latest research and telling you about the latest breakthroughs, the Science and Research Show is on The Scope.
Interviewer: I'm talking with Dr. Ray Gesteland, emeritus professor of Human Genetics at the University of Utah. Emeritus. I guess that means you've been around a while.
Dr. Gesteland: I've been around a long time.
Interviewer: When did you start at the University of Utah?
Dr. Gesteland: I came here in 1978.
Interviewer: What was it that brought you to Utah from the East coast, I believe, right?
Dr. Gesteland: So I had been at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, hot bag of genetics and molecular biology for about 11 years. Jim Watson was the director of that institution. And I worked with him as assistant director and had not known much of anything about Utah.
And then two things happened that made my ears perk up. One was Mario Capecchi, who I had worked with as a graduate student years ago. Had made the decision to move to Utah, and he was leaving Harvard to go to Utah. So that told me something special must be happening there because I had great respect for him. John Roth spent a sabbatical year in my laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, a very smart geneticist from Berkeley, and he was moving to Utah. And I said, "If those two guys are going to Utah, there must be something really unusual going on."
Then I had the opportunity to come out here and look at a job, and it was love at first sight. Staying at the Alta Lodge, looking at High Rustler in the springtime was hard to turn down. But it was really the genetics opportunity, when I saw what the genetic resources were here.
Interviewer: And what were those resources?
Dr. Gesteland: Well, it was mostly people, a great bunch of people who are at Utah with the idea of doing long-term projects that would be hard to do many places, where quick return is expected. And there was the Mormon genealogical database, which I really didn't know much about, but realized this has got to be important for the future of understanding genes in humans.
But I think it was the style of the place more than anything else that really appealed to me. That the guy down the hall is a colleague, not a competitor, and he's someone you can do things with, collaborate with, made it very appealing.
Interviewer: And what was it like then?
Dr. Gesteland: There was already a genetics effort going on here and really goes back to some of the early founders. George Cartwright, Frank Tyler, Max Wintrobe, Eldon Gardner, who saw the opportunity of pursuing genetics long before any of this technology came along, partly because of the unique resources here in Utah.
In fact, the very first research grant that the National Institutes ever gave out, the only one at the beginning in 1945, came to Utah to Frank Tyler to study a family with muscle disease. He had assembled a huge family with many, many members, some of who had the disease, some of who didn't. And he got this $300,000 grant from NIH to begin to study that family. So that goes back to 1945.
Interviewer: Yeah, that's amazing.
Dr. Gesteland: And then Mark Skolnick came in 1974, I believe, to begin to computerize the genealogical database. That was really started by a planning grant for cancer research from NIH. And the thought was that if we could get the genealogical records in a computer database, we could begin to search and assemble families that would be useful to study for understanding their genetics.
Interviewer: And that's what's called the Utah Population Database today.
Dr. Gesteland: And then it built from there. When the human genetics department was founded with Ray White and I as the initial leaders. That is building on a base that was already here.
Interviewer: Really the seeds of all this is the unique population that's here in Utah, I imagine. The fact that they keep detailed records on their ancestry and have large families.
Dr. Gesteland: Yeah. So I think it's more than that. The population has a real innate interest in genetics. They're interested in their heritage, their families, and keeping track of that. Plus, they're very willing to be involved in studies. You go to a family that might have a disease you wanted to look at and ask people to participate in the study, 95% of the people will sign up and say, "Terrific. Here's 10 little liters of blood. Let's see what you can do." That's very different than other places in the country.
But the value of that large database has taken on even greater meaning just in the last few years. The hope was that just by looking at large numbers of people with different diseases, you could find all the genes that cause disease. All that turned out to be not so simple because many genes are involved in most diseases. So if you would take some common disease, say, high blood pressure, you can find a thousand different genes, each of which contribute some small amount to that predisposition to high blood pressure.
Well it turns out, scanning the population at large for those genes and figuring it out just doesn't work. What works is to identify families and sequence genomes of five or six people from one family, some of whom have the disease, some of them don't. That's the way you'll find the specific genes involved in that family and then by extension to other families. So the family structure has become absolutely crucial now, for the next stage of finding genes involved in the predisposing to human disease.
Interviewer: That's what is becoming the precision in medicine initiative today.
Dr. Gesteland: Precision medicine, personalized medicine, whatever you want to call it, but it's here. It's got a long way to go, but it's going to be a fun ride to watch.
Announcer: Interesting, informative, and all in the name of better health. This is The Scope Health Sciences Radio.
