Indiana University had a hand in the discovery of the modern genetic code. More than a half-century later, IU is giving an icy response to entreaties asking questions about science moving forward and science education remaining static
By Mike Leonard
A story circled the globe recently, reporting that researchers in England had stumbled upon an organism that defies the accepted understanding of DNA, the genetic map and “Challenges long-held assumptions about how genetic translation works.”
Those assumptions go back to 1953, when Chicago native and Indiana University graduate James Watson teamed with British researcher Francis Crick to win the Nobel Prize by introducing the double helix of DNA to the world – an event that has since fueled almost every modern advance in genetics, medicine and biotechnology.
Some observers weren’t so surprised by the recent revelation. Aberrations or exceptions to what we know of the genetic “code,” or set of rules, are not unheard of. And at this moment there is a lawsuit pending in Bloomington in which Mark White, a medical doctor and Indiana University graduate, is suing IU for false advertising, educational fraud and scientific misrepresentation.
Why? For not pursuing new research, new educational concepts, and to be specific, even entertaining the notion that the accepted genetic code might not be precise in every scenario under the sun. White had reason to approach the university with his theories and accompanying evidence. He’s a Bloomington native with two degrees from IU. He didn’t just barge in from Boise.
And he doesn’t argue that the Watson and Crick were wrong. Nor were the conclusions reached by the Watson-led Human Genome Project in 1988.
White is saying that the educational model for teaching what we now know about genetics is outdated and needs to embrace the reality that science has always benefitted from more exploration and more science. He alleges that the university is quashing any discussions or presentations about his theory of alternative and what he considers more enriched views of how this incredibly consequential area of science could and should be taught.
He says he has been met with no institutional or faculty engagement and not even so much as allowing the physician, researcher and inventor to stage a “prove me wrong” breakfast conversation at, oh, one of the tree suites in the Indiana Memorial Union.
White and collaborators Rick Weidenbener and Scott Allbright came together after the latter two came to learn of, and become intellectually captivated by White’s work. Weidenbener also is a medical doctor and Allbright, a former Eli Lilly pharmaceutical firm employee who develops computational and AI-related biological research.
Frustrated by the university’s incurious if not hostile reception, White filed a lawsuit to force some sort of engagement with IU. The university has attempted several times since the suit was filed in August of 2025 to have it dismissed. Throughout, a primary argument has been to question White’s legal standing to pursue the litigation.
This set up a classic scenario.
White boils it down from his view that IU and research institutions exist to pursue and disseminate knowledge. “The only claim I have made is that IU is using a false representation. I am a taxpayer and they use public resources,” White says. “The bigger issue is whether or not IU can hold a conversation about a scientific idea. The answer, apparently, is no, and they claim they can’t be held accountable by anyone: me, you, or the court. We disagree.”
The university operates on a $4.5 billion budget and comprises a huge bureaucracy that sometimes appears impenetrable.
Mark Bode, executive director of media relations and public affairs in Indiana University’s Communications and Marketing division, responded with a response shorter than his job title when asked recently about White’s allegations. “IU does not comment on litigation,” he responded.
It wasn’t hard to see that one coming. Or this one. On June 11 the Bloomington Herald-Times asked the university why a faculty member’s employment was cancelled for her alleged and contested violation of new state rules aimed at eliminating Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs or advocacy. In a class titled “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice,” no less.
The response? The newspaper reported that “An IU spokesperson said the university ‘does not comment on personnel matters.’”
So, IU doesn’t comment on litigation. It doesn’t comment on personnel matters. There might be a pattern here. Maybe even a code.
But here we are, nearly a year after the filing of the suit, which awaits the judge’s decision on the latest IU filing. Monroe Circuit Court Judge Kara Krothe has thus far declined to 86 the litigation.
Whatever happens, White, Weidenbener and Allbright are comfortable with their entreaties and fed up with IU’s deaf ear response. The men simply want to make it clear that they think they’re onto something important and want their project to be known and scrutinized in the public and private sectors.
“We could take this anywhere – to Purdue or another research institution or the private sector, but we want to hand it to our alma mater. We certainly realize James Watson won the Nobel Prize for his work and we’d love to see that circle come back to IU with what we are doing here,” Weidenbener says.
Well, it’s complicated
The recent incident at Oxford that “defies” the genetic prescription in play was discovered by experienced, credentialled researchers who freely acknowledge that they never expected to find a phenomenon that breaks a universal rule in the well-known biological code.
A codon is a sequence of three nucleotides forming a unit of genetic code. Essentially, the discovery, in an analysis of English pond water, revealed a “stop” codon, or specific sequence of nucleotides in DNA, that didn’t perform as expected. That broke a cardinal rule within the genetic code.
White writes in a biology primer for non-biologists that the central organizing principle of the genetic code – the code of all life – is the genetic code. “Yet the standard representation of this code – the codon table – is not the code itself, but a flattened, linear map of it. It represents a fundamentally nonlinear system in a linear plane,” he writes.
“Modern computation is nonlinear, distributed, recursive, probabilistic, and learning-based,” he continues. “Biology, however, has not fully upgraded its computational metaphor … Artificial intelligence demonstrates daily that nonlinear code can learn, adapt, and optimize in ways that linear representations never could.
The computer metaphor of life was not wrong. It was incomplete.”
White and his partners have put together a book, “The Curious Case of the Missing Codon Table,” that deeply explores the entomology of scientific rules and the understanding and adoption of them. But one of his favorite ways of condensing his ultimate conclusions about the genetic code is his G-Ball, a sphere that looks like a colorful soccer ball and serves as a visual and tactile model.
It shows the relationships among proteins, amino acids and RNA in a way distinctively different from what scientists and students normally see, with the goal of making it all more informative and understandable. And he envisioned, designed and manufactured several G-Balls himself in the aging, one-time church he purchased in rural Monroe County and turned into a workshop stocked with 3D printers and various inventor’s tools.
There was a time when the science community generally thought Einstein was “out there” with his theories involving physics. Now Einstein’s quantum physics have not only been proven correct – they’ve enabled unimaginable advances in the field and changed the science landscape. There is classical physics. And there is quantum physics. A whole new ballgame.
To repeat, quantum physics have changed the world. But first, people needed to listen to Einstein, consider his hypotheses, and test them.
A colleague becomes a valuable convert
Erich “Rick” Weidenbener is a well-known Bloomington orthopedic physician whose patients and colleagues would call an evidence-based doctor. He grins knowingly at the suggestion that White’s hypothesis doesn’t have a robust volume of medical research papers and publications in journals behind it. But he joined forces with White because he believes his colleague is indeed onto something.
“Mark is a polymath. He thinks at a level that’s, whoosh, way up here,” Weidenbener says, gesturing over his head. “He sees structure in things we don’t even think about. My involvement includes interpreting Mark’s work for regular people like us,” Weidenbener says.
Weidenbener initially approached White out of interest in his colleague’s high-level game inventions, hoping to help his nephew with a project. More than a decade ago, White rolled out a game he called “Mutation” that used a “Code World” puzzle ball inspired by the machinations of the genetic code. It gained notice but the price of producing the complex puzzle balls turned out to be more than the game market could endure.
He has invented numerous things, some outside of the realm of science, including an innovative design for an adjustable golf putter. That’s the way his mind works. Dissect and think of a better structure, a better way of doing things.
White joked to a reporter once that he’s an “idiot savant.” He doesn’t shy away from proverbial rabbit holes in research. He dives into them.
When Weidenbener approached him with questions about science games such as Mutation the conversation turned quickly to the genetic code and the “G-Ball,” which draws from his previous Mutation game sphere and expands upon it greatly. “At first, I did not understand what I was being shown, but I had a strong sense that there was something deeper here than the version of the genetic code I had learned decades earlier as a biology major,” Weidenbener says.
“What followed for me was not a moment of insight, but a process,” he explains. “Over the next several months, we spent hours working through it. Along the way, I was introduced to ways of thinking that were new to me — ideas about code, symmetry, compression, coherence, constraint, and computation. I had to reconsider the difference between structure and sequence, and to think more carefully about what it means for something to be a system.”
Remember the good ol’ days, when science was something to be admired and celebrated?
White’s complex etymology explains much of the “how did we get here?” question he raises about the genetic code and what might be called a lack of vigor in research and education after Watson and Crick laid it out. And the snub from IU not even entertaining White’s hypothesis in some ways illustrates his point. What’s the harm in listening? Isn’t science about keeping on keeping on and hasn’t history rewarded that diligence? The Dark Ages excluded.
The IU campus is surprisingly populated by displays of homage to the genetic code. The former Jordan Hall, now known as The Biology Building, has the Greek word Veritas carved into the limestone building, extolling the word that means truth. Science = truth. Carvings of a microscope and chemical equipment also adorn the exterior of the structure.
Myers Hall, which houses medicine and medical science programs, is adorned with a huge inscription coined by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates: “The Nature of the Body is the Beginning of Medical Science.” Also carved into the building is a limestone frieze depicting an anatomist, a pharmacologist and a phsiologist.
The Chemistry Building boasts rows of panels on its exterior with entries from the The Periodic Table of Elements.
Kinsey had a problem with science’s uneasy cohabitation with society, too. But IU was a different place then than it is now.
A point of deep and enduring pride in IU students, supporters and graduates has long been symbolized by its steadfast support of the work of Professor Alfred Kinsey and his pioneering exploration of sex research. For some hard to understand reason, these science deniers have a problem with the linkage of biology and behavior, as if it were morally wrong.
Numerous attacks on IU’s Kinsey Institute have been rebuffed by the university over the years until recently, when the current Board of Trustees and President Pamela Whitten crumbled to pressure like an old stack of computer programming cards and looked to separate Kinsey from the university.
IU Bloomington has long held the distinction of being a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an elite organization including 71 public and private research institutions that includes all 18 members of the Big Ten athletic conference except Nebraska, which dipped under the bar to be eligible for AAU membership a year after it was admitted into the Big Ten. Most people don’t realize that the Big Ten has always taken pride in being a consortium of academic collaboration and cooperation in addition to athletics.
(The aforementioned Herman B Wells, widely agreed to have been the greatest president in IU history, was the most ardent proponent of turning the athletic conference into an organization admired throughout major universities and conferences. The Big Ten presidents all meet regularly to discuss issues and share information and ideas about academia and administration subjects central to prime directive of universities. So do the provosts. The fiscal managers. Even student groups.
But what it takes to be an AAU member or an elite level Research 1 could well be changing as IU and other schools buckle under political pressures, of which some are borderline insane.
IU has lost a reported $60 million in state funding cuts, $14.3 million from the National Institutes of Health, $6.2 million from the National Science Foundation and difficult to calculate revenue reductions to graduate student programs and other facets of the university that include, among their operational principles, programs to encourage a diverse university population (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion language).
The IU trustees and president have discontinued, suspended or merged 249 degree programs throughout the university’s nine campuses with 116 affected in Bloomington alone. One state priority, antithetical to the concept of a university education, is to eliminate programs where the graduates earn less, on average, than a working adult with a high school diploma. This completely ignores the often repeated and reinforced view that today’s graduates might have several careers in a lifetime and draw upon a classical liberal arts education that reinforces ‘how to learn’ as much as the ever-changing ‘what to learn.’
Judging programs based on what new graduates earn reveals a lack of foresight and intelligence in the statehouse, at minimum. But that line of thinking, or political pressure, seems to have devolved into trickle down education. Like trickle down economics, people say it makes sense. Except that it doesn’t happen and doesn’t work.
The languages and international studies developed because former President and Chancellor Wells sought out that funding and established “area study centers” that taught the language and culture of numerous countries emerging on the world stage following World War II. U.S. intelligence agencies have benefitted greatly from that expertise, or at least did before the Trump administration began to devalue “intelligence” as a vital tool in promoting diplomacy and preventing wars.
The languages, cultural studies and other components of IU’s curriculum enabled the creation of the Hamilton-Lugar School of Global and International Studies in 2012 and it became one of the country’s top such schools the day it became a reality. And here’s a point that needs to be made. A student in Estonian studies might draw a small salary upon graduation but become the U.S. Ambassador to Estonia years later. Somewhat similarly, Michael D. Higgins was born in Limerick, Ireland, and reared in County Clare. He studied sociology and political science at IU and earned a master’s degree. He went on to become President of the Republic of Ireland from 2011-2025.
Proponents say their salary minimum on degree programs protects students from the debt it takes to complete a four-year degree. Detractors say It ignores rational thought, upward mobility and the fact that future success hinges on knowing how to learn, not learning things that will be obsolete within a decade.
White and associates might never see IU accommodate their request to have the university consider their request to present what they believe would be a better path and better tools to understanding the genetic code. They might take their ideas and evidence elsewhere, to a campus less resistant to change than the IU Bloomington campus. Or to the private sector, where investors will attempt to monetize academic research.
Or maybe university administrators will recognize their roots in the concept of “the academy,” which emphasizes research over short term business accounting and returns to what it has been since Plato gathered learned (pronounced ler-nid) citizens outside of Athens to explore knowledge and advanced thinking. Back to the roots of Western philosophy and intellectual freedom. 🐝
Copyright © 2026 Mike Leonard. All rights reserved.