Who are we?

The core team running this project are friends and colleagues who have been working in engagement, counselling and communication about genetics for many years. This project is not-for-profit, but for humankind.

We have no positive/negative spin on genetics, nor do we seek to increase uptake in genetic research or sell anything. Our aim is to find out whether there are better ways to connect with public audiences who switch off before a conversation has even started. We are aiming to build a co-operative of partners who want to build, share and use a collective engagement strategy to communicate genetics better.

Organisationally we are based in Wellcome Connecting Science and the Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science, and the Public at the University of Cambridge. Our work explores how to connect science and society.

Founding individuals:

Professor Anna Middleton, Associate Director Wellcome Connecting Science, Cambridge and Director Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science, and the Public, University of Cambridge. Funded by Wellcome Connecting Science and the Kavli Foundation. Genetic counsellor, expert in social science research on ethical issues raised by genetics.

Vivienne Parry OBE, Head of Public Engagement, Genomics England, London, funded by Genomics England. Journalist, expert in engagement and communications.

Julian Borra, Founder of Thin Air Factory, Brighton, expert in creative story telling and communications, funded by Genomics England and Wellcome Connecting Science.

Kate Orviss, Lead of Global Genomics Initiative, People Policy Projects (PPP), London, expert in policy and law, funded by PPP.

Website and design of user journey

This website is both a home for the project and also a conduit between the creative assets and the public, i.e. the site is coded to gather research data on what the audience thinks about each of the assets.

Mark Danson, Wellcome Connecting Science, Cambridge

Ben Tomlin, Wellcome Connecting Science, Cambridge

Catherine Galloway, Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science, and the Public, University of Cambridge

Community Engagement Partner: Centric

One of our partners is Centric – experts in community engagement with members of the public from historically marginalised communities. Using skills in ‘social brokerage’ they will reach community audiences to do focus groups on some of our filmed assets. Centric are one of our key community research partners who will deliver an arm of qualitative, filmed research for the Only Human project.

The Gift of Insight

As academics, creatives and policy makers we’ve already done a significant amount of research in the space of genomics and engagement. See here for more details. The Feed shows the creative assets we’ve already made and the Research Ethics Approval details more about the research element of this website.

Creating a Co-Operative

In 2022 we launched our Call to Action with Public Policy Projects, aligned to co-incide with the G7 meeting in the UK. It started with a webinar, then a series of 6 roundtables that brought together experts in genomics, public engagement, creative storytelling, ethics, policy and then ended with a workshop at a global genomics conference. Here we started to build our network. With pump priming funding to get the project up and running from Wellcome Connecting Science, Genomics England and the Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science, and the Public, the Only Human project was born.

We are now ready to build the co-operative and are seeking donations to be be part of this.

Only Human has a number of partner types: