Journey to the center of genetics. The experience of a physicist in Iceland.

I am a theoretical condensed matter physicist and I worked for eight years at Decode Genetics in Reykjavik, a global leader in human genetics. I learned genetics from scratch with the intuition and the instincts of a physicist. I did statistical analyses of genetic data collected from the Icelandic and other populations searching for genes involved in complex human diseases. During the talk I will introduce the basic concepts of the modern human genetics, again with the physicist's mind. I will explain some statistical methods used to analyze the genetic data with examples from my work on cardiovascular and cancer diseases. I will introduce the notions of linkage disequilibrium, association, haplotype, admixture, single-nucleotide polymorphism, sequencing, and others. One intriguing result is that quite often genomic regions without a known biological role are involved in diseases. This cannot be explained with a one-dimensional model of the genome, and most often the biological mechanism is unknown.