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.

I spend a lot of time talking to other scientists, health professionals and members of the public about my work. I find the best way to deliver my research is to ask the audience what they would want to know from their genes. You can do this by asking people to raise their hands if they would want a test or not, but people often feel embarrassed to share their thoughts in front of others. I’d like to buy some voting equipment of my own that I can take to presentations so that the audience can press a button on a voting pad, this way they can give anonymous answers. The voting equipment means that the audience can participate rather than just listen to me speak and it’s also good fun too!