Profile

I’m a ‘social scientist’ so I’m interested in the impact of science on people and society. Very soon the NHS will be offering ‘sequencing’ to 100,000 patients. This means that their 20,000 genes will be looked at. That’s a lot of genes! What would you want to know? Cancer? Heart disease? Should only serious, treatable conditions be explored? What about conditions that you can do nothing about? These are questions that I am exploring in my research. The results of my research will be used to help decide what information will be fed back to patients.

Here is a survey I designed, there are 10 short films in it:  https://survey.sanger.ac.uk/genomethics/

Before becoming a social scientist I worked in the health service as a ‘genetic counsellor’ – here I explained genetics to families affected by various conditions and worked out what the chances were of passing on or inheriting a condition.

Twitter: @genomethics

Website: annamiddleton.info

My days are a mixture of sitting at a computer writing and talking to people. I do ‘social science’ and so I know how to design surveys and interview studies. My current research has involved 7000 people from 91 different countries and a typical day at the moment involves analysing what these 7000 people say about genetics.

I also spend a lot of time talking at scientific conferences, so that the scientists get to learn about the impact of their work and how people want to use it. At the moment I’m preparing a presentation to give in Cambridge and later this year I’m going to Australia, so I’m creating the slides and making sure my results are presented clearly.