George Church

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George Church (1954- ) is an American molecular geneticist. He is currently Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences & Technology at MIT.

With Walter Gilbert he developed the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984 and helped initiate the Human Genome Project while he was a Research Scientist at newly-formed Biogen Inc. He invented the broadly-applied concepts of molecular multiplexing and tags, homologous recombination methods, and DNA array synthesizers. Technology transfer of automated sequencing & software to Genome Therapeutics Corp. resulted in the first commercial genome sequence (the human pathogen, H. pylori) in 1994. He has initiated the Personal Genome Project (PGP) in January 2006 and research on synthetic biology. He is director of the US Department of Energy Center on Bioenergy at Harvard & MIT and director of the National Institutes of Health (NHGRI) Center of Excellence in Genomic Science at Harvard, MIT & Washington University.

He has been advisor to 22 companies, most recently co-founding (with Joseph Jacobson, Jay Keasling, and Drew Endy) Codon Devices, Inc., a biotech startup aiming to commercialize synthetic biology and LS9, a biofuels company. He is a senior editor for Nature EMBO Molecular Systems Biology.


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