UMBI Celebrates the DNA Day This Week
The International DNA Day is celebrated on the 25th of April every year to commemorate the day in 1953 when James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin published their papers in the journal Nature on the structure of the DNA. The knowledge about DNA and the technology related to DNA analysis have evolved tremendously over the past decades culminating in the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003.
 UMBI has been celebrating the DNA Day for the last 4 years and this year we are celebrating it again although earlier by 2 days. As with the previous years, we are inviting secondary school children to spend a day with us at UMBI to learn more about DNA and how it has changed our lives and also its impact in medicine. The field of genomics medicine is now the hottest area and researchers are now rushing to sequence as many individuals with different diseases to understand further the mechanisms of diseases including the rare conditions, the correlation between genotype and phenotype, and to identify new targets for treatment for diseases such as cancers. Malaysia must not be left behind as we have a rich biodiversity and genetic variation in our multi-ethnic population which is a gold mine for research in genomics medicine.
