Professions of the future: IT geneticist

Very soon genomic information will surpass the entire Internet in volume

Anastasia Shevtsova, "Nation"

In 2015, the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, together with the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, released the Atlas of New Professions. It contains those specialties that will finally become obsolete by 2030, and those that will be in maximum demand by that time (although some of them do not even exist yet).

Together with the Fitron fitness club, we selected several interesting professions of the future from Atlas and talked with their representatives or heralds.

We talked about the profession of IT geneticist with Artem Elmuratov, co-founder and Development Director of Genotek. This is a medical and genetic center that provides a full range of DNA analysis services.

– Why does a geneticist need the prefix "IT"? – There is a lot of information in the genome of each person. There are more than 3 billion special letters of the genome in each single set of chromosomes. According to experts, genomic information will soon overtake in volume – just in megabytes – all the information that is now on the Internet, including YouTube, and even astronomical data.

It is believed that by 2025 its volume will reach 40 million terabytes. And this is very soon. It is unknown how much genomic information there will be in 50 years. It's hard to predict so far. There will definitely be certain problems in order to store it at least qualitatively. Besides, this information is confidential. Access to it will need to be arranged, but at the same time very limited. There will be many problems and tasks, and all of them are solved just by the forces of IT geneticists. In addition to structural things (transmission, storage, access settings), there is also a very important task for the correct interpretation of data, for their bioinformatic processing. It's one thing to simply decipher the genome, another to extract the necessary information from the decoding. To recognize which medications will be useful for a person and which ones are harmful, whether a person has side risks of developing a particular disease. All this is done with the active participation of bioinformatics, statisticians and – in the future – IT geneticists.

– What diseases will we definitely be able to get rid of with the development of IT genetics already during our lifetime?

– If we, humanity, want to, then from many. It probably won't be possible to reduce this figure to zero, because there will always be some new mutations, but reducing the number of almost all hereditary diseases tenfold is a completely solvable task with the help of existing technologies. I can explain how and why.

Technology in the 1970s was extremely inefficient compared to what it is today. They allowed us to consider only individual mutations for a particular person. At the same time, it was already possible to radically reduce the frequency of hereditary diseases in certain groups of people. For example, Ashkenazim, that is, Jews of European origin, often had (still occurs, but less often) Tay-Sachs disease. A severe hereditary disease that leads to the early death of a child. In the Ashkenazi communities of North America and Canada, they began to use those rather simple screening methods – and reduced the incidence of the disease by 10 times.

Now technologies allow us to recognize not one disease, but a full range of hereditary pathologies. So, with the proper desire of people and the support of the state, we can significantly reduce the number of hereditary diseases. In the future, pathologies that in rare cases will not be detected by preventive screening may well be treated with gene therapy.

– Will nature begin to create new diseases to stop humanity in its desire to live forever and happily? – It's not that evil nature is trying to resist us. There is a certain fundamental mechanism, because of which everything in nature is imperfect. There will always be some breakdowns. At a minimum, they are necessary for evolution. Mistakes happen, sometimes good, sometimes bad. We will not get rid of mutations at all, as long as there are no prerequisites for this. And then we'll see.

– What else can an IT geneticist influence? Appearance, character, intelligence level, and so on? Won't it be like with plastic surgery, when patients sometimes get carried away excessively? – All this is possible in theory, but I wouldn't be afraid of it now. Gene technologies are used only for the treatment of very rare pathologies, for which, as a rule, there is no other method. So parents choosing eye color for a child or influencing mental abilities at the genetic level are more like stories for now.

– Do we have any moral right to interfere with genes at all? For example, the whole world knows Nick Vujicic, a motivational speaker who was deprived of all four limbs due to a hereditary disease. No one can imagine how his life would have turned out if he had been born physically full. Where is the line between treating a disease and interfering with a human personality?

– There is a constant debate on this issue. I think it's absolutely ethical to give people a choice. If a couple, future parents, can reduce the likelihood of a patient being born with specific pathologies even before conception, I think it is definitely ethical. There are different cases, each should be approached individually. There are deadly diseases, the same Tay-Sachs disease that I mentioned earlier. This is not at all like the case of Nick Vujicic. With such a diagnosis, a child definitely dies before adulthood. And if a person does not die before 40 or 60, but will suffer?

In any case, I think it's right to give people a choice.

– Can "gene correction" become state programs in developed countries in the foreseeable future? After all, any state is interested in healthy, intelligent citizens. – State programs on genetics are inevitable. Moreover, some small countries have become pioneers in this field, for example Iceland. A third of the population there is genotyped at the expense of the state. Now the big players are turning on. Several Arab countries are beginning to scan the genomes of their residents. A large-scale Precision Medicine program has been deployed in the USA. There is a response from China – their initiative in precision medicine is probably the most ambitious. If I'm not mistaken, about $9 billion has been allocated for it. So many, many Chinese genomes will be scanned. National genome sequencing programs exist even in small Estonia and Poland. Our president also spoke about this: that in Russia it is necessary to do similar programs and invest significant funds in genetics. So, I repeat, this is inevitable, at least in those countries that want to keep up in the field of medicine.

– Favorite work – book, movie – about your profession? – I really like Matt Ridley's "Genome". This is a book about genetics. Matt Ridley is a journalist who writes on various topics, studying them deeply. There are 23 chapters in the "Genome" – according to the number of pairs of chromosomes that a person has. Beautifully and well done. I like "Deciphered Life" – the autobiography of Craig Venter. He is a very interesting person in his own right. He was one of those who initiated a project on the complete decoding of the human genome at the time. Moreover, Venter's own genome was the first to be fully decoded. In addition, he made many other cool discoveries, deciphered the genomes of other organisms, did a lot of experiments in synthetic biology, roughly speaking, dealt with the creation of artificial life. Now, among other things, he is engaged in technologies that may help radically prolong a person's life.

– Have you watched 1997's "Gattaca" with Jude Law and Uma Thurman? – I watched it. Quite an interesting film, relatively accurately got into the technological aspects. The only thing that confuses me is that he is quite gloomy. People watch "Gattaca" and begin to associate genetics with discrimination. I would like more films about genetics in a positive way. Geneticists do so many cool things and improve people's lives so much that it's strange to concentrate on some potential, very distant possible echoes. If you doubt everything, progress will stop.

– So you are an optimist? – If humanity has problems, it is more likely not because of the development of genetics, but of a completely different nature - environmental, for example, or we will simply kill each other. By the way, genetics can also help ecology. And this also adds to my optimism. Agriculture can become much more efficient with the use of genetic technologies. With the help of biology, it is possible to solve problems with the pollution of the planet, the same plastic.

– Where to go to study if you want to become an IT geneticist? – There are no faculties of IT genetics yet, but there is something very close. For example, bioinformatics. This is taught very few places, unfortunately, especially in Russia. Well, MSU has a faculty of bioengineering and bioinformatics. There is a second option: to get a fundamental education in one area. You can study to be a biologist-geneticist or a doctor-geneticist, or get an education in mathematics, physics, programming, and on top of that already add the missing knowledge. Both ways are equivalent.

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