Grasping the Genome – Nancy J Kelley, JD, MPP, President & CEO + Associates – Genomic Research and the Implications for Our World

Nancy J Kelley, JD, MPP, president & CEO of Nancy J Kelley + Associates, provides an overview of the current work in genomic research. As an executive and lawyer, Nancy J Kelley has over twenty years of executive management and board experience, with a critical focus on healthcare, life science, and research, especially as they relate to business and legal, government, non-profit, and academic areas. Nancy J Kelley + Associates' mission is to aid science and medicine through building and strategic planning, to push for scientific and medical breakthroughs. Their team works to advance translational genomic research that could potentially cure disease as well as improve the quality of life.

Nancy J Kelley discusses her involvement with Genome Project-write (GP-write) an international project comprised of 200 scientists from 15 countries and over 100 institutions. GP-write's focus is to gather a full understanding of life, to reduce the overall expense of engineering and testing large genomes in cell lines, and create new tools and specific technologies for engineering biology. She relates how the project has a goal of understanding the blueprint to life provided by the Human Genome Project, but an equally important goal is to develop new technologies. The Human Genome Project was an international project with a primary mission—to determine the exact sequence of nucleotide base pairs that, together, make up human DNA, as well as to identify and map all genes of the human genome.

The science executive explains that researchers must build genomes in order to fully understand how biological systems operate. And this understanding will have long-term implications in nearly every arena, from food, to new materials, to energy, healthcare and beyond. Through this work, researchers hope to find new ways to make cell lines resistant to viruses. Nancy J Kelley states that synthetic biology, or as she refers to it—engineering biology—is a growing field that businesses and governments are extremely interested in. And although the GP-write project is slated for a ten-year run only, her expectation is that GP-write will open the doors for continued study and developments for many years to come.