Pardis Sabeti on the future of genomics

Posted by on July 1, 2008; This entry is filed under Uncategorized.
Share on FacebookShare on Google+Email this to someoneTweet about this on Twitter

Pardis Sabeti on The Future of Genomics (video). Via Sandy.

11 Comments

  1. agnostic July 1st, 2008 at 10:50 pm

    Not like genomics really needs any more advertising, but that’s it right there: study genomics, work with Persian babes.

  2. razib July 1st, 2008 at 11:50 pm

    what if she’s azeri??? though the name doesn’t look turkish to me….

  3. agnostic July 2nd, 2008 at 2:05 am

    I don’t think so either. Googling pardis azeri gets orders of magnitude fewer hits than pardis persian, and the same for her last name. 
     
    But there’s only one way to know for sure: to ask her.

  4. BGC July 2nd, 2008 at 5:15 am

    Um… It’s okay – but I didn’t find this video snippet particularly original or insightful. Surely this is just the usual ‘party line’ for pronouncements by human genetics researchers?  
     
    I first heard this line about genetic and medical therapies more than 15 years ago. (Right down to the idea that everyone will have their genome sequenced ‘within 5-10 years’).  
     
    The fact is that the potential of genetics to lead to therapeutic breakthroughs in medicine has been hyped and over-hyped for a long time. Eventually the predictions will, of course, come true; but the timescale is already more than a decade behind schedule.  
     
    I gave an interview on this topic for the UK Open University.  
     
    http://www.open2.net/sciencetechnologynature/worldaroundus/two_genome4.html 
     
    another similar view come later in the program at: 
     
    http://www.open2.net/sciencetechnologynature/worldaroundus/two_genome6.html

  5. carles July 2nd, 2008 at 7:07 am

    Hi, I asked here ten years ago and she said her parents were from Iran, if that helps in this small controversy.

  6. razib July 2nd, 2008 at 12:50 pm

    I asked here ten years ago and she said her parents were from Iran 
     
    ethnic groups in iran: 
    The main ethnic groups are Persians (51%), Azeris (24%), Gilaki and Mazandarani (8%), Kurds (7%), Arabs (3%), Baluchi (2%), Lurs (2%), Turkmens (2%), Laks, Qashqai, Armenians, Persian Jews, Georgians, Assyrians, Circassians, Tats, Mandaeans, Gypsies, Brahuis, Hazara, Kazakhs and others (1%). 
     
    the current supreme leader of iran is from an azeri family, and azeris traditionally dominate the military.

  7. pconroy July 2nd, 2008 at 1:25 pm

    I don’t know much about Iranian linguistics, except that the name Persia comes from Fars Province: 
     
    F?rs is the original homeland of the Persian people. The native name of the Persian language is F?rsi or P?rsi. Persia and Persian both derive from the Hellenized form ?????? Persis of the root word P?rs. The Old Persian word was P?rs?. 
    The name of the Fars is derived from P?rsa, the Old Persian name for Persia and its capital, Persepolis.     
     
    So names of people and places of Persian descent, often start with “Per”/”Fer” or “Par”/”Far” – like Ferdowsi, Parsis, and maybe “Pardis”…

  8. TGGP July 2nd, 2008 at 2:57 pm

    Trita Parsi is the only one I can think of off the top of my head with that kind of surname.

  9. agnostic July 2nd, 2008 at 3:39 pm

    Well the name “Pardis” is indeed Persian — it’s the Farsi word for “paradise” (that word entered English via some ancestor of Farsi). It’s just a question of whether Azeris would also give that name to their kids.

  10. razib July 2nd, 2008 at 3:57 pm

    my ? was mostly because i’m interested in the fact that there is a perception/assumption that the iranian american community is ethnically persian, but if you look at the statistics only about half of iranians are persian. i know about persian jews, who tend to be persian speaking from what i know, but i never hear about azeri iranians despite the fact that this group is very prominent in iran (i have made the argument on this blog that azeris, in the form of the safavids and their qizilbash followers, invented iran as we know it. i.e., a multi-ethnic nation-state coterminous with the heartland of the pre-islamic iranian empires and united by a shia religious identity and a persian cultural core).

  11. Kambiz Kamrani July 3rd, 2008 at 11:39 am

    I wanted to throw in a comment related to the name Pardis Sabeti.  
     
    The root word in her last name is, sabet, is Farsi. It means to enlighten. To my knowledge, it is not derived from an Azeri language. Her first name, as pconroy and agnostic wrote, is explicitly a Farsi name and means paradise.  
     
    I think it is pretty safe to say that her name is ethnically Persian, but I do not know about her ancestry or what she and her family identify with. 
     
    Kambiz

a