IGM's Louise Bier interviewed on genetic counseling podcast
The Beagle Has Landed podcast probes the All of Us Research Program
As we get underway with All of Us, the huge tax-payer funded project to assemble a database or genomic and medical information on 1 million Americans, there are people working hard to make sure it fulfills two founding principles. First, to treat participants like partners (and this means giving them access to the results). And second, to make sure this effort leaves no one out. Interviewed by podcast host Laura Hercher, Louise Bier, MS, CGC, of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Columbia University, shares her experiences in the trenches of AOU as the Executive Director of the NYC Consortium of All of Us. This initiative is helping to put together the infrastructure that will create a database that looks like America in all ways: not only ancestry and race, but sex and gender, socioeconomic status and geography.
The podcast with Louise can be found here.
About The Beagle Has Landed:
Genetic counselors are a growing group with a strong sense of themselves as pioneers, genetics ambassadors, charged with educating both patients and providers about genetics and how it can be used responsibly and ethically. For much of the field, ‘genetic counselor’ is an identity as well as a job.
The Beagle Has Landed will be a forum for this emerging community. This site will feature interviews with leaders in the field of clinical genetics, exploring our complicated past and our rapidly-changing present. Conversations will cover issues in current practice, such as controversial new forms of testing that are profoundly changing the experience of pregnancy for many women, or the introduction of personalized tumor testing as standard of care in oncology. We will look at new roles genetic counselors are playing in industry as well as in clinical settings, and bring in the voices of other stakeholders, including basic scientists and families affected by genetic disease.
The Beagle Has Landed will be the first independent media outlet to focus specifically on genetic counseling.