One of the great pleasures of being president of the American Society of Human Genetics has been the opportunity to think about human genetics in the world beyond the lab. I was doing so one weekend near the beginning of my term, and part of my brain was also listening to reports from Tahrir Square on NPR. The reporter was a citizen journalist named Mona Seif, whom I’d heard several times previously on NPR and whose reports I had found very informative, rich in detail, concerned with precision, and aware of the limits of information from the frontlines. On this particular evening, it was difficult to hear the report from Cairo over gunfire in the square, but it was nonetheless direct and clear. A few months later, I heard an interview with Mona Seif, and in this interview she was asked about her work when not in Tahrir Square. She was a graduate student, she said, working in cancer biology.‘‘My work in particular is on the BRCA1 gene,’’she said,‘‘which is one of the genes connected with breast cancer incidence, and I’m investigating the mutation pattern in Egyptian patients.. Both [science and activism] are very consuming, time and energy—and emotions. And I’m only starting to get the handle of doing both at the same time and juggling between my activism and my work’’(see Web Resources). Her political work after the events in Tahrir Square has been as a member of No to Military Trials for Civilians, which advocates for the release of civilians detained by the military during the revolution. Hearing this interview on a quiet evening in my lab, I had a Proustian sense of déjavu. In this essay, I will explore that sense and its possible implications for a new generation of geneticists. Throughout this past year, I’ve been thinking about the scientist as a citizen of the world, the role personified by Mona Seif. In thinking about this role, I’ve realized that the scientist does not come to it by making explicit choices as for a field of study or a research project. Instead, the citizenscientist role seems to me to grow organically from the culture of 21st century human genetics. I will try to suggest how this culture defines us in a natural way as world citizens. I hope that this analysis can provide a ‘‘reference sequence’’for involvement in the world.

Our Culture What, then, are some of the iconic features of our culture, what does it mean to us, and what responsibilities does it impose on us? The central feature of life in science is that the people doing it want to be here. We enjoy this life. Science is fun. Human genetics is enormous fun. It allows us to be imaginative and creative. It is work for a greater good yet appeals to our curiosity and our pleasure with puzzles solved. The work is useful and valued by society. What more could we ask?