UCL STS Seminar series: Lara Choksey, Composite Genomic Portraits

Composite Genomic Portraits

Abstract

In 1878, Francis Galton published the first of several papers on composite portraits. The paper explained his idea for producing composite versions of individuals and human types by layering up multiple photographs of them. Galton thought that this would produce more complex portraits of individuals, and more accurate correlations between physical type and social behaviour. This talk brings the idea of composite portraits to the history of a reference human genome produced during the Human Genome Project in the 1990s. While the reference genome is in itself an extraordinary technical object - the combined genomes of a few individuals now used in genomics labs all over the world - this talk focuses on the proximity between genomic references and composite portraits, considering the tension between biological types and statistical averages in current genomic research.