Raj S. Ramesar

Title: Parent of Origin Effect: Will Africa be Relegated to the Role of a Neglected Parent Watching its Successful Children Bicker Over Their Inheritance

Emerging countries are at very disparate stages of engaging with the products of the Human Genome Project. In the East, and in some parts of Latin America (notably Mexico and Brazil), there has been a ready engagement with genomics and other high-throughput technologies in an unprecedented manner. This is very likely the result of an active engagement of academic institutions with support from government. The involvement of government and academia is crucial in reaching threshold momentum for ready uptake in education and training, and for engaging with disciplines beyond just human genetics and health research, to e.g. food security and agriculture. I refer to this as a scaffolded approach, where a participatory or supportive government may further engage other facets of the state, e.g. Trade and Industry, Science and Technology, Agriculture and Health to engage with academia in long term strategic initiatives aimed at enhancing any state’s development.

In Africa, a wide range of genetic studies have been undertaken (Sirugo et al., 2008), and several large-scale genome-based projects are currently underway, mostly marshaled from outside of the continent, and which, as part of their original design, set out to contribute significantly to training and capacity development. There is little evidence however, that the instruments of capacity development are sustainable beyond the actual focused interest of foreign researchers. This is because African governments, institutions and researchers have not adequately engaged with one another about the strategic importance of genomics, and have not capitalized on the foreign investment. More recently, with the establishment and growth of the African Society for Human Genetics, work is currently underway to facilitate intra- and inter-national cooperative projects which aim to harness the opportunities offered through the diverse indigenous African populations (Hardy et al., 2008).

With the above background, the debate about which African genomes will be sequenced soonest, and how to engage with whole genome data, at a society level, is largely academic. There has been great interest in studying the genomes of Africans, largely to understand human origins and diversity, not because this has been requested by Africans. There is little evidence to suggest that whole genome sequencing is going to be beneficial to individuals in the short term, particularly without adequate interpretive skills available. It is likely, that studies involving African subjects will be carried out, on and off the continent. However, and philosophically, very few Africans have ever been considered as more than research subjects, they seldom asked to be involved, and have not engaged in the net benefit that the rest of humanity and the respective researchers have derived, and will derive. The emergence of the ‘whole genome sequence’ era is a good time to reassess our reasoning to involve samplings of all identifiable groups of humanity in research, without a commitment to engage with relevant governmental and academic institutions, to bring to people, albeit via a very long and hard road, the benefits of the whole genome sequence, such as these might be.