Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. The geneticist, innovator, and entrepreneur, George Church of Harvard and MIT, developed the methods for the first genome sequencing and his subsequent work has brought down the price of sequencing over million-fold. His was one of the two research groups that first got CRISPR-Cas9 to work for precise gene editing in human cells by a homologous recombination and he has been behind countless other scientific innovations and disruptions, specifically in the world of precision genome sequencing.
Church: I had three fathers; the first one was in the Air Force and had a variety of jobs thereafter but was only with me for the first few months. I remained in Florida getting an early terrible education. That was a defining feature, but the result was that I got a lot of extracurricular experience.
I loved nature. I spent a lot of time on the mudflats and swamps and with living creatures. My third father was a physician; I was heavily influenced by his medical bag that he carried around on house calls, which even then was quite an anachronism.
My third father had been there for two years. It was four years of heaven. It totally challenged me and stimulated me to study all kinds of things like art, photography, and athletics, but mostly science and math. One of the first things I sought out in ninth grade was a computer, as Phillips had a connection with the Dartmouth computer time share, which nobody used.
I found that it was in a basement with no chairs, no furniture, and I just started working on it. Church: I never wanted to specialize. As it turned out I was fairly strong in math and physics, but zoology and chemistry were what I ended up doing. In my spare time I did research in crystallography, which really did combine all of the fields in an obligatory way.
