Message from President

President  Endo Takashi

The Genetics Society of Japan (GSJ) is an academic society with a long tradition to represent a proud legacy from its establishment in 1920. Since the rediscovery of Mendel’s law of heredity in 1900, genetics keeps on evolving significantly as the leading academic discipline of life science from the 20th century until now in the 21th century, in accordance with several landmark events including: the development of Drosophila chromosome map by T. H. Morgan, the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA by J. D. Watson & F. H. C. Crick, attainment of genetic recombination technology, success of the Human Genome Project in 2000 and the appearance of the next-generation DNA sequencer. However, with advances in genetics, it has been diversified into a broad array of issues and specialized too much into the particular domains. This brings our concerns that individual researchers may feel increasingly difficult to understand living organism comprehensively.
Major activities of the GSJ are to issue the Gene & Genetic Systems (GGS: bimonthly) and to hold the annual meeting. The GGS is an academic journal in English that took over for the forerunner, the Journal of Genetics (firstly published in 1921), which covers a broad range of agendas from molecular genetics to evolutionary genetics. The GSJ annual meeting has a tradition to provide oral presentations only, which allows participants to listen in various thematic topics at once including gene expression, population and evolutionary genetics. Additionally, we introduced the English-speaking sessions into the annual meeting from 2012 to provide valuable opportunities of oral presentation in English for younger researchers. Moreover, we hold the open seminars for general public simultaneously with the annual meeting, aiming at further popularization of genetics. In this manner, the GSJ promotes broad range of activities relevant to genetics, firmly addressing its role as a forum to facilitate proper discussion platforms and contribute valuable suggestions to our society on related issues.

The GGS is widely opened to both GSJ member and non-member, thus your paper submission is always most welcome on any subjects related to genetics not only of life science but social science. In terms of the annual meeting, we will maintain our stance for the future that oral presentation is the very measure valued truly as conference presentation. We would like to invite you to become a member of the Genetic Society of Japan on this occasion, if not yet.

President  Endo Takashi