# Mike White: academia and genomics in the 21st century

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/razib-khan-s-unsupervised-learning-4024133/mike-white-academia-and-genomics-in-the-21st-century
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/razib-khan-s-unsupervised-learning-4024133/mike-white-academia-and-genomics-in-the-21st-century.md
Podcast: [Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning](https://stenobird.com/podcast/razib-khan-s-unsupervised-learning-4024133)
Published: 2026-03-01T20:38:18+00:00
Episode link: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/mike-white-academia-and-genomics
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/189162895/ac49da57a708d17ec2317b507b717db3.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/razib-khan-s-unsupervised-learning-4024133/episodes/mike-white-academia-and-genomics-in-the-21st-century
Duration seconds: 1203

## Resource

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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 th…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/razib-khan-s-unsupervised-learning-4024133/episodes/mike-white-academia-and-genomics-in-the-21st-century/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/razib-khan-s-unsupervised-learning-4024133/mike-white-academia-and-genomics-in-the-21st-century.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.