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

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

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.

"[24][25] The work gave rise to publications including a PNAS 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.

[3] 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.

[8] Church is now the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School,[32] and a member of the Harvard-MIT health sciences and technology faculty.

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.

[35][36][37] In 2021, Church joined as a co-founder of HLTH.network (formerly Shivom),[38] a healthcare blockchain startup which created the world's first global genomics data sharing and analytics marketplace.

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.

[45][46] Described in that publication were the cyclic application of fluids to a solid phase alternating with imaging, plus avoidance of bacterial cloning, strategies that are still used in current dominant Next-Generation Sequencing technologies.

[58] Church furthermore announced his intention to publish his DNA via NFT and use the profits made through its sale to finance research conducted by Nebula Genomics.

He has co-invented several uses for DNA, including detectors for dark matter – Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs),[66] anti-cancer "nano-robots",[67] and strategies for digital data storage that are over a million times denser than conventional disk drives.

The research was published in Science Translational Medicine in 2021 and showed the possibility of a less immunogenic gene therapy with the new TLR9-edited Adeno-associated viruses (AAV) as a safer viral vector.

[75] In early 2018,[76] Rejuvenate Bio was launched from the Church lab at the Wyss Institute at Harvard to prevent and treat several age-related diseases in dogs, extending their overall lifespan.

[78][79] As the co-founder of Rejuvenate Bio in an interview Church said, Science hasn't yet found a way to make complex animals like dogs live forever, so the next best thing we can do is find a way to maintain health for as long as possible during the aging process.

[82] In March 2015, Church and his genetics research team at Harvard successfully copied some woolly mammoth genes into the genome of an Asian elephant.

[84][85] Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux, founder-CEO of Global Space Ventures and an investor in Colossal Biosciences, said: In 2014, I asked my friend Elon Musk who he knew who was poised to make profound changes in the field of genomics, and he said: George Church.

[86][87]Through his Harvard lab, Church has co-founded around 50[10][12] biotech companies, including Veritas Genetics (human genomics, 2014, with Mirza Cifric, Preston Estep, Yining Zhao, Joe Thakuria), Warp Drive Bio (natural products, 2011, with Greg Verdine and James Wells), Alacris (cancer systems therapeutics, 2010, with Hans Lehrach, Bernhard Herrmann, and Shahid Imran), Knome (human genomics, 2007, with Jorge Conde and Sundar Subramaniam),[88] Pathogenica (microbe and viral NGS diagnostics, 2009, with Yemi Adesokan),[89] AbVitro (immunomes, 2010, with Francois Vigneault),[90] Gen9 Bio (synthetic biology, 2009, with Joseph Jacobson and Drew Endy), EnEvolv (Genome Engineering), Joule Unlimited (SolarFuels, 2007, with Noubar Afeyan and David Berry), LS9 (green chemistry, 2005, with Chris Somerville, Jay Keasling, Vinod Khosla, Noubar Afeyan, and David Berry),[91][92][93] and ReadCoor (spatial biology, 2016, with Richard Terry and Evan R.

[55][56] He has participated in the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues,[96] cautioning about the risk of synthetic DNA and proposing risk-reduction via licensing and surveillance.

[103] Church faced criticism for his response to a question from Der Spiegel where he speculated that it could be technically possible to make a Neanderthal by reconstructing its DNA and modifying living human cells accordingly.

[107][108] He has participated in news interviews and videos including at TED, TEDx,[109][110][111] and TEDMED venues, at PBS's Charlie Rose,[112] Faces of America, and NOVA, as well as at PopSci, EG, and The Colbert Report.

[113][114] He is a regular contributor to Edge.org publications and videos[115] and is a member of the Xconomists, an ad hoc team of editorial advisors for the tech news and media company, Xconomy.

", where she states: Like an engineer, he (George Church) tends to see the universe not as a disparate set of mysteries but as a machine with a vast array of buttons and levers, each begging to be pushed and pulled.

Other honors include the Triennial International Steven Hoogendijk Award in 2010 and the Scientific American Top 50 twice (for "Designing artificial life" in 2005 and "The $1000 genome" in 2006).

He goes on to elaborate 4 reasons:medical (cholesterol in fish & dairy), energy conservation (up to 20-fold impact), cruelty ("organic" animals are deprived of medicines that humans use), and risks of spreading pathogens (not just the flu) ... [noting that] veganism is an issue for which personal and global love of life, health and wealth align.

In the context of the Personal Genome Project, journalists at Forbes and Wired have noted Church's openness about his health issues, including dyslexia, narcolepsy, and high cholesterol (one of the motivations for his vegan diet).