Genomics in East Africa

The annul East African young scientists Workshop took place in July at Morogoro Tanzania. This Workshop is organized by Dr Patrick Duffy and his collegues Dr Michal Fried, Prof Gwakisa and Dr Mutabingwa the MOMS project leader.

The theme for the workshop was on bioinformatics and genomics.

It is usually an excellent opportunity for young biomedical scientist to learn and network. As it has happened in previous workshops, we got to get to interact with senior and expiriencedd biomedical scientists from around the world. For the second time i served as a student and also as a facilitator and gave a talk on computational vaccinology or immunoinformatics

Among the faculty for this year were Dr Pete Bull, Dr Stephan Kappe,Dr Malcolm Gardener, Dr Peter Myler, Dr David Roos, etc. .

My major question at the end of the workshop was, is East Africa ready for the post genomic era? How adequate are our research institutes prepared to embrace these important technologies?
Are our politicians ready for it? or it is it still magic?

In Kenya we are going to the polls by the end of the year and am eagerly waiting to hear of a politician who will talk about embracing genomics and bioinformatics to push our medical and agricultural research to the next level. In Kenya the new buzz word is ICT (information communications technology) but talking of IT and computer technology in such a term is like talking of the planetary issues in terms of the galaxy! The term ICT is too generic and we need to decompose it to its disciplines and then tackle the challenges individually. Actually to a some politicians selling the Safaricom IPO is ICT so is computerizing the Nairobi stock exchange.

My point is, it is time to move our biological research to the next stage through actively spearheading efforts to integrate and foster capacity building in bioinformatics and genomics. These challenges need to be addressed by the government.