Learning And Improvement In Hereditary Diseases

Thank you for inviting me to give this year’s Desmond Whyte lecture and for the President’s very kind introduction. It is a great honour to give this lecture, and particularly in Altnagelvin hospital where I spent many Wednesdays in outpatients seeing families with genetic disorders, and regularly availed of the excellent radiology service that Desmond had set up some years ago. The title of the lecture fits in with Dr McBride’s presidential theme of ‘learning and improvement’ and my specialty of Medical Genetics is an excellent example of this. 50 years ago, it hardly existed and has developed from virtually nothing to become a crucial part of everyday medical care in all branches of medicine. In fact it’s getting so important to have a genetic test for patient care nowadays that our test budget is usually completely spent in the first quarter of the financial year the demand for genetic tests from so many specialties other than our own, being so great.