George Church

George McDonald Church (born August 28, 1954) is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, chemist, serial entrepreneur, and pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology.

He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

Through his Harvard lab Church has co-founded around 50 biotech companies pushing the boundaries of innovation in the world of life sciences and making his lab as a hotbed of biotech startup activity in Boston.

George McDonald Church was born on August 28, 1954, on MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida, and grew up in nearby Clearwater.

He attended high school at the preparatory boarding school Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1968 to 1972.

He then studied at Duke University, completing a bachelor's degree in zoology and chemistry in two years.

In the fall of 1973, Church began research work at Duke University with assistant professor of biochemistry Sung-Hou Kim, work that continued a year later in a graduate biochemistry program at Duke on an NSF fellowship.

As Peter Miller reported on Church for the National Geographic series, "The Innovators":"As a graduate student at Duke ... he used x-ray crystallography to study the three-dimensional structure of 'transfer' RNA, which decodes DNA and carries instructions to other parts of the cell. It was groundbreaking research, but Church spent so much time in the lab—up to a hundred hours a week—that he neglected his other classes [in the fall of 1975]."

As a result, Church was not compliant with Duke graduate academic policies, and was withdrawn from the degree program in January 1976.

He was told that "[We] hope that whatever problems ... contributed to your lack of success ... at Duke will not keep you from a successful pursuit of a productive career."

The work gave rise to publications that include a Proceedings report with Church as lead author on an early model for molecular interactions between the minor groove of double-stranded DNA and β-ribbons of proteins.

Church returned to graduate work at Harvard University in 1977 under Walter Gilbert, and completed a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology working on mobile genetic elements within introns of yeast mitochondrial and mouse immunoglobulin genes (1984).

After completing his doctoral work, Church spent six months of 1984 at Biogen, the industrial laboratory site where Gilbert had relocated a sizable part of his former Harvard group.

This was followed soon after by a Life Sciences Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco with Gail R. Martin, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and joint-discoverer of a technique to extract mouse embryonic stem cells.

With Walter Gilbert, Church published the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984.

Church joined the Harvard Medical School faculty as an assistant professor in 1986.

Church is now the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and a member of the Harvard-MIT health sciences and technology faculty.

He was also a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

Church has served as director of the Center on Bioenergy Technology at Harvard, funded by a multiyear award from the U.S. Department of Energy, and of the Center of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS) at Harvard, funded by a P50-type award from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), a part of the National Institutes of Health.

He co-founded Veritas Genetics and its European and Latin American subsidiary, Veritas Intercontinental, with the idea of bringing the benefits of genomic data to millions of people globally.

Since 2007, Church has served on scientific advisory board of the Chinese life sciences company BGI Group.

Church was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2012 for contributions to human genome sequencing technologies and DNA synthesis and assembly.

In 2017, Time magazine listed him in Time 100, the list of 100 most influential people in the world.

In 2022, he was featured among the most influential people in biopharma by Fierce Pharma, and was listed among the top 8 famous geneticists of all time in human history.

, Church serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors.

In 2017, BGI established the George Church Institute of Regenesis, a research collaboration between Church's lab and about a dozen staffers at BGI in China.

Dr. Xun Xu, executive director of BGI Group said,

"Professor George Church is a legend in this field for his creative achievements in gene editing and genome synthesis. With support of advanced technology platform of China National GeneBank, the collaboration between BGI and Professor Church will bring top resources and talents together to overcome current bottleneck issues and further improve the technology."

In 2018, the Church lab at Harvard made a record by spinning off 16 biotech companies in one year.

The Church lab works on research projects that are distributed in diverse areas of modern biology like developmental biology, neurobiology, info processing, medical genetics, genomics, gene therapy, diagnostics, chemistry & bioengineering, space biology & space genetics, and ecosystem.

Research and technology developments at the Church lab have impacted or made direct contributions to nearly all "next-generation sequencing (NGS)" methods and companies.

In 2018, Church co-founded Nebula Genomics, a personal genomics company that offers a whole-genome sequencing service.

The company says that it is developing its own blockchain, with the purpose to improve privacy and security while also giving the possibility to people to have free sequencing in exchange of their genomic and personal data but, despite that, re-identification of people starting from the genetic data could still be possible (DNA itself is a unique identifier), law enforcement could still issue search warrants or subpoena the data and this technology, given also the fact that is hard to implement, could still be vulnerable to data breaches.

In 2021, Church joined as a co-founder of HLTH.network (formerly Shivom), a healthcare blockchain startup which created the world's first global genomics data sharing and analytics marketplace.

The HLTH.network aims to be the "world's first base layer protocol for global health data."

On February 18, 2020, Nebula Genomics, a personal genomics company founded by Church, announced that had partnered up with BGI; the saliva samples sent to Nebula Genomics for decoding are then sent by the company to BGI labs in Hong Kong for sequencing.

Nebula Genomics said that this partnership was made to bring down the cost of whole-genome sequencing (they offer 30x whole-genome sequencing for $299), since normally it has a cost that makes it inaccessible to most people.

Church is known for his professional contributions in the sequencing of genomes and interpreting such data, in synthetic biology and genome engineering, and in an emerging area of neuroscience that proposes to map brain activity and establish a "functional connectome".

Church is known for pioneering the specialized fields of personal genomics and synthetic biology.

He has co-founded commercial concerns spanning these areas, and others from green and natural products chemistry to infectious agent testing and fuel production, including Knome, LS9, and Joule Unlimited (respectively, human genomics, green chemistry, and solar fuel companies).