Patrick O'Reilly Brown (born 1954) is an American geneticist and businessman who is the founder of Impossible Foods Inc.[3] and professor emeritus in the department of biochemistry at Stanford University.

[9] In 1985, Brown took a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco with J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus (who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discoveries about how genes can ignite cancerous tumors).

[10] At UCSF, Brown and colleagues defined the mechanism by which retroviruses, such as the HIV virus, integrate their genes into the genome of the cells they infect, which helped lead to development of new drugs to fight the disease.

[12] "I had a mental image of a DNA microarray, even including the red and green fluorescent spots, a few years before I'd figured out the details of making them," Brown told The Scientist.

[14] Shortly after their first description of DNA microarrays, the Brown laboratory published a “how-to” manual on the Web that helped these robotic devices become standard equipment in life science labs throughout the world, in an effort led by Joe DeRisi, Michael Eisen, Ash Alizadeh, and others.

... We had already existing tools that we could use to so to speak hyperlink things so that you could reorganize information in systematic ways, but they weren't really being exploited by the conventional scientific literature," Brown said in an interview with BioMedCentral Biology.

[17] The magazine Nature reported that the scientists' open-access movement could "spell the end for many print titles";[18] Brown called subscription-based scientific journals "anachronisms.

[22] Brown said he had a "hunch" that the key to meat's unique taste was its high abundance of heme, an iron-containing molecule in blood that carries oxygen and is found in all living organisms.

I got to a point where, though I didn’t have much data, I had enough to go and talk to some venture-capital companies — of which there are a ridiculous number in Silicon Valley — and hit them for some money,” Brown told The Sunday Times.

[33] However, in 2018 the FDA stated that it had “no questions” regarding the safety or regulatory compliance of Impossible Foods’ soy leghemoglobin,[34][35] a decision which has since been upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

[38] These statements have put Brown at odds with the meat industry, which by mid-2019 had successfully pressured state legislatures in Missouri[39][40] and Arkansas[41][42] to pass laws barring plant-based protein manufacturers such as Impossible Foods and competitor Beyond Meat from labeling their products as “meat.” The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change strongly endorses Brown's venture and vision, saying that animal-based meat is a "problem" and that in order to "achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the global food system must undergo transformative change... By replacing animal products, consumers have enormous power to spare land for biodiversity and carbon capture, halt greenhouse gas emissions at the source, and alleviate demand on fresh water needed for healthy ecosystems.

They aim to eliminate the destructive environmental impact of the global animal farming industry by inventing sustainable and scalable ways to produce delicious, nutritious and affordable meat and dairy foods.

"[51] In 2018, the United Nations Environment Programme named Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat joint winners of the Champions of the Earth Award, in the Science and Innovation category.