Dr. Steven Jones

We are living in an exciting time—where cancer is being forced to reveal its genetic tricks and give up the molecular underpinnings it has been secretly using to grow within our bodies and evade our drugs. Couple these insights from sixty years of basic science charting and painstakingly determining the roles that genes and proteins normally play in our cells, and we have an unprecedented view of how cancer cells are working against us. We also now have the DNA sequencing tools in place to determine the combination of molecular changes that drive the growth of a particular patient’s tumour at...

As Head of Bioinformatics at the Genome Sciences Centre, my role is to oversee the computational analysis of the DNA sequence data that we are generating. While sequencing technologies can now rapidly produce copious amounts of raw DNA sequence, computational challenges remain. Currently, we have over nine petabytes of disk space – that’s nine million gigabytes, or the equivalent space on more than 70,300 of the best iPads. And there are over 8,000 CPUs churning away 24/7 analyzing these sequences. Detective Work The human genome contains around three billion base pairs of DNA sequence...

During the tail end of my PhD in Cambridge, I was contacted by Dr Michael Smith from the University of British Columbia. He explained he was interested in visiting the Sanger Institute , in the UK. Obviously, I was fully aware of the famous Dr Smith—British Columbia's home grown Nobel Prize winner. Although, to this day, I am not one hundred percent clear why he contacted me, I was nonetheless delighted to show him around the Sanger Institute. At that time the Institute was bursting at the seams with DNA sequencing activity for the human genome project. It must have been even more fascinating...

I grew up on a sheep farm in Wales, near a small town called Lampeter. My favorite subject at school was biology and I was lucky to have very engaged and passionate teachers in that subject that fueled my interest further. Similarly on the farm, I was always fascinated and intrigued by the selective breeding that had gone on to create the diversity of agricultural breeds, not only differing in their physical appearance but also in their temperaments and behaviour. Image: www.upsplash.com On being inspired This led me to do an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of Bristol,...