Randy Wadkins, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Mississippi, grew up in Iuka, Mississippi, a small town in the northeast corner of the state, where Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee meet. His father owned a grocery store and his mother was an elementary school teacher. He became fascinated with science through watching Star Trek reruns as a child in the 1970s. “I had no idea a career in science was even a possibility,” Wadkins shares. “I did well in math and science when I was in high school, and like a lot of kids, I started college in the pre-med program. It wasn’t until I took organic chemistry that I realized how much I liked it and switched to the chemistry program. My pre-med advisor thought I had lost my mind. Then I took physical chemistry and it became clear what I wanted to do with my life.”
Wadkins received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1986 from the University of Mississippi. As a graduate student at the school the following year, he had a defining moment at the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting. “My very first meeting was in 1987 in New Orleans. I was a first- year grad student, a kid from Mississippi. I was doing a combination of experiments on drugs binding to DNA, which involved quantum chemical calculations of DNA bases stacking with drugs,” he remembers. “I had a poster with my results at the BPS meeting that year. The late Bernard Pullman, the world’s expert at the time on quantum biochemistry, came to my poster—specifically to see MY POSTER—and asked questions about what I was doing. I talked to him for half an hour, and as he was leaving he said, ‘Nice work.’ That’s when I said to myself, ‘I can do this. I can have a career in biophysics.’ And I did.”
He earned his PhD in chemistry in 1990, and then took a postdoc position inTom Jovin’s lab at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry where he worked for a year. It was here that he became enamored with biophysics. “I made a weird discovery. That era was when DNA synthesis first became possible, and we could work with individual strands for the first time, and not just double strands like calf thymus DNA that has been around for decades,” he says. “I found that single-stranded DNA could be a high-affinity target for antitumor drugs. That led to a 25-year obsession with unusual DNA conformations.”
Paul Roepe, Georgetown University, met Wadkins in the early 1990s at a Biophysical Society meeting. “We had adjacent posters. We struck up a great conversation on the biophysics of drug diffusion,” he shares. “He is a scientist that takes nothing for granted and nothing at face value. Meaning that for Randy, hypotheses are of course very useful and enlightening, but they are just hypotheses; the data, and rigorous critical evaluation of the data, are really all that matter.”
“The postdoctoral era was one of the most interesting and stressful periods of my life. The PhD glut that everyone complains about now is nothing new, so I ended up doing a lot of postdoc jobs,” Wadkins says. “Later I was at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, followed by the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. I nearly gave up on science as a career, but caught a break.” He took a position at the San Antonio Cancer Institute and later was hired as an assistant professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Since 2003, Wadkins has been at the University of Mississippi, where he studies unusual DNA structures as drug targets. “My lab just moved into the National Center for Natural Products Research on campus,” he says. “My research is at the intersection of small molecules, natural products, DNA, and proteins that bind DNA.”
Over the years, his biggest challenge has been one faced by nearly every scientist: funding. “I’ve been very fortunate to have had funding from one source or another for 18 straight years. It hasn’t always been enough to do everything we wanted to do, but it kept the doors open and the students busy,” he says. “You face [this challenge] by continuing to try to get funding. If you have a basic science lab, nobody comes to you. You have to go to them and sell your idea.”
Wadkins has spent the last year away from his lab, as the Biophysical Society’s first Congressional Fellow, working in the office of Congressman Steve Cohen of Tennessee. “This [experience] has opened my eyes as to how the government really works,” he says. “It’s much different from the civics classes I took in elementary school — do they even teach those anymore? I handle the healthcare portfolio for the congressman, and that is an incredibly complex issue, but unlike biophysics, the underlying principles are not simple. Nobel laureate Michael Levitt was here for the Biophysics Week Hill briefing, and I told him that if he thought quantum mechanics was difficult, try Medicare billing codes.”
His time on Capitol Hill will soon be coming to a close, and Wadkins says there is much he will miss upon returning to academia. “I’m going to miss the astonishing learning experience you get on the Hill. Not only do Nobel laureates drop by to give briefings, so do directors of programs at NIH, NSF, NASA, etc.; advocacy organizations for every imaginable cause; celebrities of every magnitude; political leaders of every stripe; business leaders of every area of commerce; and military leaders,” he says. “They all come to the Hill to inform Congress what is happening in the world. It is a fire hose of knowledge, and I will miss trying to drink in every drop.”
He looks forward to returning to the University of Mississippi and putting his experience to good use in fostering government outreach efforts. “I am also playing Powerball every week on the slim odds that I could stay in the congressman’s office another year,” he jokes.
Wadkins plans to continue looking into uses of DNA as a nanomaterial, despite some challenges. “Everyone working in the field knows that DNA is not cost-effective for mass production. I look forward to figuring out how to merge DNA’s ease of use with a material that is more conducive to use in scale-up applications,” he says.
He advises early career biophysicists, “Hang in there. It’s a bumpy career. Even now, I get frustrated some days and throw my hands up. But 30 years from now, you’ll look back to your first experiments in grad school and think, ‘I made the right decision to do this.’ And what I’ve discovered from being a Congressional Fellow for a year is that not only will your training get you ready for a career in biophysics, it will get you ready for everything.”