Deanne Taylor had a problem with the Human Cell Atlas. The ambitious project to map every cell in the human body launched in 2017 with a glaring omission: it was only studying adults. For Taylor, director of bioinformatics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, this was a familiar frustration. Medical research has long treated children as miniature grownups, but their cells express genes differently—switching them on and off in ways that can turn a drug adults tolerate fine into something dangerous for a kid.
So Taylor got to work. She joined the Human Cell Atlas volunteer team, helped draft the pediatric section of its white paper, and rallied a cross-hospital coalition of pediatric researchers. That campaign produced a 2019 paper making the case for studying children and, in 2021, helped secure a $38.5 million NIH grant for the Developmental Genotype-Tissue Expression Project, or dGTEx. The initiative banks tissue from healthy children whose parents donated their bodies after death, then maps gene expression across all major organ systems. Taylor’s team curates the associated data—family history, sample details—while a separate group runs the analysis. The result will be the first comprehensive baseline of what healthy pediatric development looks like at a cellular level.
That baseline matters more than it might sound. The Human Genome Project gave researchers a parts list, but no assembly manual. Knowing a gene exists doesn’t tell you where or how it’s used in a growing body. dGTEx data, which will eventually feed into the Human Cell Atlas’s new pediatric section, could finally help answer questions that have dogged Taylor her entire career—like why two people can carry the same disease-linked gene variant but only one gets sick.
Colleagues describe Taylor as the connective tissue holding disparate research efforts together. Sarah Teichmann, cofounder of the Human Cell Atlas, credits her with pushing for a holistic view of pediatric development rather than siloed studies of individual organs. It’s the kind of infrastructure work that rarely makes headlines but determines whether future research can even happen. Taylor herself traces her intensity to a ‘random walk’ career—biophysics PhD, coding for Pfizer’s rare-disease work, building embryo-screening software still in use today—and to what she now recognizes as undiagnosed autism and ADHD. The throughline, she says, has always been the same: why the same illness hits people differently. Kids, it turns out, have been the missing variable all along.
