2012 Presidential Address: The scientist as a citizen of the world.

One of the great pleasures of being president of the American Society of Human Genetics has been the opportunity to think about human genetics in the world beyond the lab. I was doing so one weekend near the beginning of my term, and part of my brain was also listening to reports from Tahrir Square on NPR. The reporter was a citizen journalist named Mona Seif, whom I’d heard several times previously on NPR and whose reports I had found very informative, rich in detail, concerned with precision, and aware of the limits of information from the frontlines. On this particular evening, it was difficult to hear the report from Cairo over gunfire in the square, but it was nonetheless direct and clear. A few months later, I heard an interview with Mona Seif, and in this interview she was asked about her work when not in Tahrir Square. She was a graduate student, she said, working in cancer biology. ‘‘My work in particular is on the BRCA1 gene,’’ she said, ‘‘which is one of the genes connected with breast cancer incidence, and I’m investigating the mutation pattern in Egyptian patients.. Both [science and activism] are very consuming, time and energy—and emotions. And I’m only starting to get the handle of doing both at the