Who We Are

Concerned about impacts of fashion choices on genomic integrity, the biologist Rachel Aronoff has kept a website for several years aiming to 'end fashion victimization' in the most serious sense of the phrase!  After many years, she finally took that old website*, its domain, genomicintegrity.org, and its blog one step further, to become the non-profit association: AGiR! Action for Genomic integrity through Research! 

This move will hopefully allow better transmission of information and encourage further directed research about what factors result in the most damage and the best means to protect and preserve genomic integrity**. 

Luckily, she (shown at the first General Assembly meeting, in Sept 2013) found some people willing to help get this all going, hoping to provide information and promote research!  :)   (Most likely a new page should be added soon to describe them and their interests… but here are a few of them with RA, in a picture taken after the second General Assembly meeting, February, 2015.)

Officially, as of the last general assembly meetings (February 2023) on the executive committee of AGiR!, as a public service association in Switzerland, are:

Rachel Aronoff, PhD, as founder and president,

Halyna Inomistova, as secretary, and

Carol Bonvin, as treasurer

We tried to stick to business, for this, our 10thGA meting, as we had a special guest... (dear Oliviichka, Halyna's granddaughter)

Here is the presentation, another prezi, from the previous meeting, our 9th GA!

Please see the 'Founder_Statement' below, for a few paragraphs from RA on her motivations in forming this public service association.  

Here also is the link to her old wiki for her students, just in case you want to explore some more biology basics.  

If you would like to join in on (or start) any discussions, this wiki site or the blog are useful tools. 

One of the Prezi's for her students (ca 2011) gives, as extra background, some history for how humans gradually built up understanding about genetics and DNA ...

We are still learning more about DNA and the RNAs that regulate so many aspects of its expression and stability.

Other active members in AGiR! and its supporters include people from Zurich to Geneva (and, as international members, valued participants, and friends, from all around the world).  

Use the contact form to join in!

Spreading the word about genomic integrity could help individuals, populations and our environment!

* bluewin finally got rid of their free websites, so only some info (to about 2011) from the 'mirror site' of the old bluewin website remains somewhat on-line at the ad-ridden 'tripod' server. The latest news page at that time was pretty much a collection of announcements, especially about the EFV Prize, to 'End Fashion Victimization' given for ideas on how to get the message about genomic integrity out to a broader audiences. In particular the idea to have a broader focus on dynamic 'genomic integrity' instead of mainly discussing genotoxicity of hair dye ingredients was a big turning point.  This won the EFV Prize of 2009, and we will celebrate 10 years of action for genomic integrity on 1 December 2019.  The old 'tips and tricks' page of the original Swisscom EFV site and some of our early attempts at translating such information can be checked out on this tripod site, still, and a couple of such highlights are collected in one page here.

** Also keeping in mind that this is not static, and can be subject to experience-dependent plasticity, particularly in the immune system - and new data suggest such activities may even happen in the brain!