2 May 2015

Stephen O'Brien: animals, genes and disease

From Saturday Morning, 11:05 am on 2 May 2015

Stephen J O BrienDr Stephen O’Brien is Chief Scientific Officer at St Petersburg University, and the head of the Genome 10K project which plans to sequence the genomes of 10,000 invertebrates, so that biologists and geneticists will have the raw data to help with conservation research. He describes the case of the formerly endangered and badly inbred Florida panther.

Stephen O'Brien used to work for the USA’s National Cancer Institute, which discovered a range of genes which influence human response to the HIV/AIDs virus. This led to the development of drug therapies which are still in use today.

He talks to Kim Hill about his work.

Dr Stephen O’Brien is the author of the book Tears of the Cheetah and Other Tales From the Genetic Frontier (St. Martin's Griffin, 2003).

He is visiting New Zealand for the Allan Wilson Centre 2015 International Lecture Series, giving the talk: A Moving Landscape of Wildlife Genetics.