The Illinois Biology and Politics Summer Institute

Abstract

interesting and timely conference examining the interplay between social and genetic factors on political behavior took place July 5-9, 2009 at the Institute for Genomic Biology on the campus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the Illinois Biology and Politics Summer Institute was directed by political scientist Ira Carmen and entomologist Gene Robinson, both of the University of Illinois. Six faculty presented before 23 NSF funded Fellows and nine University of Illinois Fellows over a four-day period. Most of the fellows were graduate students and post-docs from around the country, with a smattering of faculty Fellows joining the discussion. The conference kept to a very rigorous schedule, with close to seven hours of lecture and discussion per day. The focus of the conference was the new field of sociogenomics. In its narrow meaning, genomics refers to the study of the genome of an organism as a whole, as opposed to genetics, which is the study of individual genes. In a larger sense, genomics is concerned with the very complex interaction between the genomes of organisms and their structural and behavioral features. Sociogenomics, then, is the study of the molecular basis of social behavior. The various presentations were roughly evenly divided between lectures on the methods used in sociogenomic research and the findings that sociogenomicists are discovering through the thoughtful application of those methods. The Institute was clearly organized around a big idea that was emerging from genomics in general and sociogenomics in particular; namely, that the well-