Big shoes

When I was young my mother would ask me to help her pollinate some of her prized orchids. She would name them ‘var X var’ and the new plant would be slightly different than the one it came from. Little did I know that I was being introduced to genetics.

When I got into high school Biology and fell in love with the Punnett square, the rest was history. I pursued Mendel and trained with the leading scientist /adviser in plant breeding in the Philippines, the same professor who trained my mother in college. It was exciting to study the chromosomes of ancient corn species, and later to find the genes that let rice adapt to flood-prone fields. But it was my love for medicine that brought me away from plants and my jade mountain.

I went 3000 miles away to the east coast, USA to study humans, their genes and diseases, and I concentrated on asthma and allergies, the immune diseases that plague my family. For some reason, my work was good enough to land me a job under one of the best minds in statistical genetics, where I worked on the genetics of myopia for five years. And now here I am at your service, blogging for genetics and health.

In my lifetime (and I’m not that old yet, mind you) there were a plenty of big shoes to fill. With Genetics and Health, two of these have to be Dr. Hsien-hsien Lei and Elaine Warburton. Hsien put this blog on Google and she understands genetics like she breathes it. Really she does. Elaine’s expertise and the vast community in genetics brought this blog into wider focus of health and medicine.

Two big shoes to fill. I hope someday they fit me.

If you’re here and visiting, I would love to hear from you. If you’re a student, I hope I can help with school. If you’re a current reader, welcome from the new writer. I hope you stay and exchange ideas with the rest of us. Feel free to share links, posts and news back and forth. There is so much to discover about “our genes, our lives” and the field is growing like never before, don’t you think?

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