Ray

I've been blessed with a few, exceptional, mentors in my career. Academia is full of bogus mentors, more bent on building their own careers than developing the next generation of scholars (I'd say they know who they are, but in fact they generally don't). Real mentors love the dialogue between mentor and protege, rather than loving their own monologue.

I need to work backward on this post, for reasons that will become apparent shortly, and I don't intend to cover the whole set of mentors here. I've mentioned Liz, of course. Others deserve attention, and I plan to honor them all. But Ray White, who died in October, deserves his own memorial. Official obits can be found here and here, so I will not recount the details of his life and achievements, though they are many and impressive.

Liz and I moved to Utah largely because Ray was there. Ray had given a talk at Northwestern in 1985 explaining his vision for the soon-to-be Human Genome project, drawing in part from the development of molecular genetic technology and in part from the genealogical resources available in Utah. Liz found a post-doc in Human Genetics--Ray was Chair of that department. I was just hanging around at the time.

When we arrived, in the Fall of 1986, the atmosphere at Utah was amazing. The emerging promise of genetics was happening on the ground, and everything else seemed small in comparison. There were battling teams, strategies, approaches, and the stakes felt (and were) high. Ray White was the high point, and both positive and negative energy flowed around him.

Any chat with Ray was stimulus for deep thought, some of which I have not yet progressed all the way through. He was enormously confident in the progress of genetic technology and in his (and his team's) ability to surf that technology to great achievement, very very soon. I was not a member of that team until very late in Ray's stint at Utah, at a point when many of the original members of his team had either gone on to great jobs at other places, or found themselves suddenly interested in extricating themselves from a fraught political battle that Ray was losing at the University of Utah. I knew of the battle, and how it would likely go, but found the prospect of working on the projects that we were trying to hatch so stimulating that I never really considered alternatives. I had a lot of confidence of my own--probably a little too much, in retrospect.

He was tall, handsome, charismatic, overweight. There was no doubt you had to bring your A game to any conversation with him. I'd had a little time to develop some ideas and found him willing to listen, from which developed a relationship that was much more about sharing ideas than about successful projects. The ideas were good, but a few years ahead of the technology, and seriously derailed by the post-9/11 internet collapse. We were basically talking 23andMe, but the underlying tech wasn't there yet, and no one wanted a biotech IPO right after 9/11 when the (first) tech bubble burst.

So it all fell apart. We collected a lot of DNA samples from families at high risk for cancers of several kinds, mostly prostate, breast, and colon cancers. The biotech company that was funding the work (DNA Sciences) folded suddenly in February 2002 before any useful amount of genotyping was done (using what is in any case ancient technology by current standards). At the same time, new technologies made family studies look uninteresting and NIH didn't want to fund us. We got some money from the Komen Foundation to do detailed genotypes for the breast cancer families, and have struggled even to get that work published (but you can read it here). Nowadays you would sequence them all, and have a more definitive story to tell. It can still be done, but the take home message is the Anna Karenina principle--that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way--and the otherwise praiseworthy mania for replication of biomedical studies is a complication: if each high-risk family has a different mutation of a different gene (or non-gene), it's exceedingly hard to find another example of the same thing with the same effect. Or a similar-enough thing with a similar-enough effect.

None of that is Ray's fault, of course. He understood a great deal more about how this would all play out than I did at the time. I'm still catching up, but likely won't ever get there. I'm grateful that I was able to spend so much time in his company.