Mike White: academia and genomics in the 21st century

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Mike White, a Genetics professor at the Washington University in St. Louis. White has a position at the School of Medicine in St. Louis, where he leads a research team focused on understanding the biophysical architecture of regulatory DNA. He earned a B.A. in music before pivoting to the sciences, receiving his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Rochester in 2006 and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Wash U under Dr. Barak Cohen. White’s work combines functional genomics, synthetic biology, computational biology, and deep learning to decipher how cells interpret regulatory sequences. His lab aims to predict how non-coding genetic variations impact complex human traits and disease risk, while exploring how to apply transcriptional circuits for broader applications in health and agriculture.

Razib first talks to White about the cultural, political and social winds moving through academia since 2010. How did academic science become so politically polarized, and what significance does it have for future funding streams? White brings his insights from the viewpoint of someone whose perch is in a medical school, and so somewhat at the margins of the cultural revolution sweeping through academia and even STEM. He notes it seems that the activist high tide peaked around 2020, though the hostility between the Right and institutional academia continues unabated, affecting NIH funding.

Then White discusses where we are in terms of understanding gene regulation, and its importance in biological function. Razib and White review how almost 99% of the human genome does not code for proteins, so often it is called “junk DNA,” but the reality is that there are other functions in that region, first and foremost, regulating and modifying protein expressing regions. Razib asks White where we are in human genomics more than 25 years after the draft, has it lived up to expectations? And where we are going in the future?