Episode description

Three years ago David Mittelman came on Unsupervised Learning to talk about emerging possibilities on the frontiers of genomics, and his new startup at the time, Othram. Since then, Othram’s work has been featured widely in the media, including in a Law & Order episode, and the firm has solved thousands of unsolved cases, with nearly 500 public. For over a decade, Mittelman has been at the forefront of private-sector genomics research. He trained at Baylor College of Medicine and was previously faculty at Virginia Tech.

Razib and Mittelman discuss the changes that the rapid pace of genomic technology has driven in the field of genetics, from the days a $3 billion dollar draft human genome in the year 2000 to readily available $200 consumer genomes in 2024. One consequence of this change has been genetics’ transformation into information science, and the dual necessities of increased data storage and more powerful, incisive data analysis. Genomics made information acquisition and analysis so easy across the research community that it allowed for the pooling of results and discoveries in big databases. This has pulled genetics out of the basic science lab and allowed it to expand into an enterprise with a consumer dimension.

Mittelman also discusses the improvements and advances in DNA extraction and analysis techniques that allow companies like his to now glean insights from decades-old samples, with bench sciences operating synergistically with computational biology. Razib and Mittelman talk about how he has helped solve hundreds of cold cases with new technology, in particular, at the intersection between new forensic techniques and both whole-genome sequencing and public genetic databases. They also discuss the future of genetics, and how it might touch our lives through healthcare and other domains, passing from inference to fields like genetic engineering