Question: is it interesting finding out when people will get a disease from their genes

Ian Simpson answered on 24 Jun 2014:

Well thats not quite how it works for our research as we’re not very close to the clinical work i.e. the patients. What we do is try to understand which genes have something to do with a disease and learn what exactly they do or what goes wrong. This is step one in trying to work out what we might do about it.

Certainly there are changes in DNA that are detectable in people and some of those are known to either pre-dispose people to or cause certain diseases. In these cases finding that out early can really improve their quality of life and may even mean that the disease is kept under control for good. It also often means that advice can be given to them about the chances of any children they might have being affected are. This kind of work is done by people working in Clinical Genetics or as Health Councillors normally as part of the NHS.