Democrats prize experts in staffing the Executive Branch while Republicans prefer political operatives and media spokespersons. But across the issue spectrum, policies are increasingly complicated and technical, requiring knowledge of many previous rounds of institution-building and policymaking. New social problems require remixing of complex policy tools, often led by research and experts. Addressing climate change and public health, for example, requires professionalized expert workforces and technical analyses. Even seemingly value-based areas of policymaking such as economic development and racial discrimination increasingly require subject-matter experts and formalized training. And the issue of higher education itself has increasingly divided the parties. Chapter 6 documents how each policy area is increasingly dominated by complex proposals from liberals accompanied by conservative suspicion of expert-led governance. Policy knowledge and evaluation capacity have become increasingly tethered to the Democratic Party, with believably nonpartisan expertise now in short supply.

Having covered the discovery of microRNAs, the expansion of their universe, the cataloguing of their presence in the kingdoms of life, how they control gene activity and why this is so important, and finally how they are applied in science and medicine, we come to the end. Here, there is an opportunity to ask, ‘What’s next?’ What are some of the most exciting directions in current microRNA research and what lies over the horizon? This final chapter explores some of the latest questions. What is the totality of the influence of microRNAs in the most complex systems in the body and what technologies will we use or need to answer these questions? Are there components of the microRNA pathway still to be found? Some of the most advanced applications of microRNAs are in the field of synthetic biology, where microRNAs can be useful in engineered cells and systems. After such a richness of discovery about microRNAs during development, research is now asking questions about what microRNAs do towards the ends of our lives. Finally, a speculation about whether microRNAs or molecules like them exist beyond the borders of Earth, wherever else life is found in the universe.

The genome is the totality of information that directs the making and the maintenance of you and every other living organism. Scattered among the familiar genes that code for the proteins of life are other genes. This is a book about the genes we call microRNA. It is 30 years since their discovery. They are gene regulators, every bit as vital as their more famous gene cousins. MicroRNAs fine-tune how much protein is made in our cells, each one coordinating the activity of hundreds of genes and bringing precision to the ‘noise’ of gene expression. Without them, life is virtually impossible. This introduction provides a personal account of what fascinated the author about these genes enough to make him redirect his research to microRNAs. The journey from studying pharmacology in the UK, to the USA where his interest in the brain disease epilepsy began, and later to Dublin, to work at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. It lays out the contents and style of the book, which is part history of science, describing what we know and the experiments that underpin our understanding, and part memoir of the author’s own research, and the applications of microRNAs in medicine.