Meeting Theme:Back to Basics！

It is a great honor to be asked to host the 67th Annual Meeting of The Japan Society of Human Genetics, a historic and time-honored conference. Vice-president of this year’s annual meeting, Dr. Kenichiro Hata, head of the Department of Maternal-Fetal Biology at the National Center for Child Health and Development, and I will be hosting the meeting at PACIFICO Yokohama from Wednesday, December 14 to Saturday, December 17, 2022.

The field of genetic medicine has made dramatic progress in recent years, not only in elucidating the causes and pathological conditions of diseases, but also in elucidating the diversity in physical constitutions and predispositions. Brilliant discoveries are being made one after the other in developing various technologies for use in genome analysis as well as new clinical testing technologies that make use of genome analyses. The field of genetic medicine has also had a major impact on a wide range of other medical fields, including cancer genomics, regenerative medicine, drug development, vaccines, intractable diseases, lifestyle-related disease care, and prenatal testing, and work has also begun in the field of precision medicine and other new medical initiatives. The tide of genome science is now sweeping through all health-related fields.

While this has brought us a number of great benefits, there are concerns that, swept along by the tide of such rapid progress in genome science, we may lose sight of its true nature and origins in research and medical care. Which is why we have chosen “Back to Basics!” as the theme of this meeting. We hope that this annual meeting will provide an opportunity to return to the basics of research and medical care within the fields of genome science and human genetics, and to deeply reconsider their essential qualities and true natures, with the goal of further developing The Japan Society of Human Genetics and the field of genome science.

We hope to make this a meeting where you can interact with others from a broad range of fields while accessing the latest findings and a diverse range of other information relating to genome science, and experience marvelous surprises and diversity. I look forward to welcoming many of you to join us.