Rarer than all the stars in the galaxy

The truly interesting angles piled up quickly yesterday as I researched a man I’d never heard of before.

• Like President Russell M. Nelson at his same age, this man had published dozens and dozens of cutting-edge research papers in the field of medicine.
• Like President Dallin H. Oaks and Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, who were presidents of BYU at age 39, Latter-day Saint leaders yesterday entrusted him with leadership of a church university at the relatively young age of 40.
• Unlike anyone else before him, he was able to explain to 7-foot, 6-inch American basketball player Shawn Bradley just why Bradley was so tall.

Meet John “Keoni” Kauwe, the new president of BYU-Hawaii.

Bradley, who is also a Latter-day Saint, and Kauwe met by chance when they happened to sit next to each other on an airplane.  Kauwe had a degree in genetics and Bradley had a question about his own genes. The odds of the two BYU alums meeting on a plane were nothing compared to the odds of Bradley’s genetic makeup.

Kauwe and a research partner determined those odds at 1 in 10 to the 30th power or, as Kauwe would tell the Wall Street Journal, “It’s less than 1 divided by the number of stars in the galaxy.”

Here’s another way of looking at it: “Mr. Bradley’s height is 8.6 standard deviations above the average height for U.S. males, putting him in the 99.99999th percentile,” Kauwe and his partner wrote in a 2018 paper they published about Bradley in the International Journal of Genomics.

But Bradley already knew he was an outlier for height. What he didn’t know was why. Kauwe drew Bradley’s blood and sequenced his DNA, but he didn’t find any rare genetic mutations.

Meanwhile, Kauwe was busy trying to cure Alzheimer’s. He’s so good at advancing the study of the disease that he has published more than 100 scientific papers in journals like Science, Nature Genetics, Biological Psychiatry and JAMA Neurology, a publication of the American Medical Association.

So both men had to wait for a new study on gene traits that identified thousands of markers for height. Once that study emerged, Kauwe could compare Bradley’s DNA to those markers.

Kauwe had been right. There was no single, rare genetic mutation. Instead, the answer to Bradley’s question of why he was so tall is this: He has nearly all of the common genetic variants that affect increased height.

“It was like he’d been given a million dollars in pennies,” The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Cohen wrote (paywall).

“He’s just a normal guy who’s really, really tall,” Kauwe told the paper.

Now Kauwe has been entrusted to lead BYU-Hawaii by an interesting group of leaders:

• President Nelson, chairman of the Church Board of Education and world-renowned as a pioneer in open-heart surgery, a career that included publication of more than 70 scientific articles. Kauwe’s own research is prolific and useful: His papers have been cited 11,495 times by other articles since 2015 alone, according to Google Scholar.
• President Oaks, first vice chairman of the board, and Elder Holland, chair of the board’s executive committee. They are positioned to share some advice.

“Heaven has sent us a divine shaft of light cast on John SK Kauwe the Third, better known to us and from here on as Keoni,” Elder Holland said in making the announcement. “That shaft of light has led his servants to find Keoni, to get better acquainted with him and to extend to him the call to be the next president of Brigham Young University-Hawaii.”

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