Robert Green is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. He’s the director of Genetics Research at Brigham and Women’s hospital and the co-founder of Nurture Genomics, where they’re doing genomic screening for infants to detect and mitigate actionable genetic conditions.

If you don’t understand what that means, you’re in the right place because we have a long conversation, digging into that topic and picking it apart for your understanding.

This is a super exciting frontier for medicine. We are at a point where we know the science, and we know how to sequence a genome. We know how to correlate some of those things that we see in the genetic code to actual health problems that are predictive.

Some of this is just a bug in the code that causes you to get some kind of cancer or other degenerative disease. We know it’s there and in a lot of cases, we actually know what to do about it.

There is no systematic screening for people, much less for infants. That’s what Robert’s trying to solve. This is very important, very exciting stuff and It will change the future of how we take care of people and prevent genetic diseases from disrupting their lives and taking their lives.

You want to know about this. This is a great conversation. He’s very good at explaining what’s been found in the science and how they’re implementing it.  Enjoy!

Important Links:

• G2P
• Nurture Genomics
• Harvard Medical School
• Brigham and Women’s Hospital

About Robert Green

Robert C. Green, MD, MPH is a medical geneticist and physician-scientist who directs the G2P Research Program in translational genomics and health outcomes in the Division of Genetics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Green is currently Associate Director for Research of the Partners Center for Personalized Genetic Medicine, a Board Member of the Council for Responsible Genetics and a member of the Informed Cohort Oversight Boards for both the Children’s Hospital Boston Gene Partnership Program and the Coriell Personalized Medicine Collaborative. He was the lead author of the recently published recommendations from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics for management of incidental findings in clinical sequencing.