Gil Omenn Gives a Lecture at the BA
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Alexandria—
Gil Omenn, Professor of Medicine, Genetics and Public Health, University of Michigan, gave a lecture entitled “The New Biology: From Science in the Modern World to the Genetics of Diabetes” on Tuesday, 6 January 2009 in the BA Lectures Hall. The Lecture was given during the proceedings of the Science SuperCourse Day that was inaugurated on Monday, 5 January 2009, and attended by a number of eminent scholars and scientists from all over the world.
Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Director of the Library of Alexandria, introduced Professor Omenn to the audience and mentioned the fact that he discovered the Omenn Syndrome (named after him) back in 1965 when he was still a student.
Professor Omenn started the Lecture by referring to Dr. Serageldin’s call for renewal of science in Muslim countries in August 2008. He went on to commend the BA as a leading force of cooperation between the North and the South. The lecture dealt with a rather new topic, namely Biology as an Information Science, and also explored other potential emerging fields such as synthetic Biology and personalized Genomics.
It is worth mentioning that Gil Omenn is the co-principle of the Science Supercourse Project that intends to build a knowledge network in four main scientific domains namely: Medicine, Engineering, Environment and Agriculture. This is to be achieved through a collection of 100,000 golden PowerPoint lectures within a year and one million in three years from scientists worldwide and making them accessible via the Internet.