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 University.
Through his Harvard laboratory, Church has co-founded around 50 biotechnology companies. In 2018, the Church laboratory at Harvard spun off 16 biotechnology companies in one year. The Church laboratory works on research projects that are distributed in diverse areas of modern biology like developmental biology, neurobiology, information processing, medical genetics, aging, genomics, gene therapy, diagnostics, chemistry & bioengineering, space biology & space genetics, and ecosystem. Research and technology developments at the Church laboratory have impacted or made direct contributions to nearly all "next-generation sequencing (NGS)" methods and companies.
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. , Church serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors.
Early life and education Church was born on August 28, 1954, on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, and grew up in nearby Clearwater, Florida.David Ewing Duncan, 2010, "On a Mission to Sequence the Genomes of 100,000 People: The geneticist George Church advises or licenses technology to most companies involved in sequencing", The New York Times, June 7, 2010. Retrieved February 26, 2015. He attended high school at the preparatory boarding school Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1968 to 1972.Alex Salton, 2009, "Geneticist George Church '72 Sought Independence at PA", The Phillipian, April 17, 2009, see . Retrieved March 2, 2015. He then attended Duke University, where he obtained a B.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 National Science Foundation fellowship.
As Peter Miller reported on Church for the National Geographic series, "The Innovators": 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."Duke University Graduate School, Office of the Dean, 1976, "Dear Mr. Church ...", January 16, 1976, private letter from W.G. Katzenmeyer, Associate Dean, to George McDonald Church, in the archives of G.M. Church. Retrieved March 4, 2015. 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.
Church returned to graduate work at Harvard University in 1977 under Walter Gilbert,Jeffrey Perkel, 2013, "BioTechniques: Celebrating 30 Years of Methods Development", BioTechniques 55(5), November 2013, 227–230, see . Retrieved March 21, 2014. and completed a Ph.D in biochemistry and molecular biology working on mobile genetic elements within introns of yeast mitochondrial and mouse immunoglobulin genes (1984).
Career 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,LSRF, 2015, "Resources, 1983 Fellow George Church", see . Retrieved February 26, 2015.LSRF, 2015, "Fellows:Alumni, George Church (1984)", see . Retrieved February 26, 2015. a member of the National Academy of Sciences and joint-discoverer of a technique to extract mouse embryonic stem cells.Elie Dolgin, 2009, "Stem cell rat race", The Scientist, April 1, 2009. Retrieved February 26, 2015.
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,Heidi Legg, 2014, "Harvard Professor George Church and the future of genomics", at BetaBoston, a Boston Globe site (online), December 25, 2014, see . Retrieved March 2, 2015. 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. He served as the director of the Center of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS) at the Harvard Medical School, 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.
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 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, intending to provide free sequencing in exchange for users' genomic and personal data. The decentralized nature of a blockchain also has the potential to improve aspects of data privacy and security, but identification of individuals could still be possible (DNA itself is a unique identifier) and law enforcement could still issue search warrants or subpoena the data.
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." In 2025, Church joined Lila Sciences, an AI agent platform startup, as Chief Scientist.
George Church Institute of Regenesis: collaboration with BGI Group, China Since 2007, Church has served on the scientific advisory board of BGI Group.
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:
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.
Research 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).
Church and the foundation of genomics With Walter Gilbert, Church published the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984. 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. These technologies began to affect genome-scale sequencing in 2005. Church also helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984. He invented the broadly applied concepts of molecular multiplexing and barcode tags, and his genome was the fifth whole human genome ever sequenced. Church was the first person to make his medical records and genome publicly available to researchers. Technology transfer of automated sequencing and software from his Harvard laboratory to Genome Therapeutics Corp. resulted in the first bacterial genome sequence and first commercial genome (the human pathogen Helicobacter pylori) in 1994. Church was co-inventor of nanopore sequencing in 1995, which is now commercially available (e.g. Oxford Nanopore Technologies), but not in the form embodied in Church's contribution to the original patents.
To aid in the interpretation and sharing of genomes, Church initiated the Personal Genome Project (PGP) in 2005, providing the world's only open-access human genome and trait data sets. Eight trios (mother, father, and child) from the Personal Genome Project are in the process of being chosen to act as the primary genome standards (reference materials) for the NIST+FDA genomeinabottle.org program.
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. In June 2022 20 NFTs with his likeness were published instead of the originally planned NFTs of his DNA due to the market conditions at the time. Despite leading to mixed reactions the project is considered to be part of an effort to use the genetic data of 15,000 individuals to support genetic research. By using NFTs the project wants to ensure that the users submitting their genetic data are able to receive direct payment for their contributions.
Synthetic biology and genome engineering Church has co-developed "genome engineering" technologies since 1997 via either general homologous recombination (recA and lambda-red) or via sequence-specific nucleases. Since 2004, his team has developed the use of DNA array (aka DNA chip) synthesizers for combinatorial libraries and assembling large genome segments. He co-developed Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (MAGE) and optimized CRISPR/Cas9, discovered by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for engineering a variety of genomes ranging from yeast to human. His laboratory's use of CRISPR in human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPS) is the latest contender for precise gene therapy.
His team is the first to tackle a genome-scale change in the genetic code. This was done in a 4.7 million basepair genome of an industrially useful microbe (E. coli) with the goal of making a safer and more productive strain; this strain uses non-proteinogenic amino acids in proteins, and is metabolically and genetically isolated from other species.
He has co-invented several uses for DNA, including detectors for dark matter – Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), anti-cancer "nano-robots", and strategies for digital data storage that are over a million times denser than conventional disk drives. Together with polymerase, DNA can be used to sense and store variation in photons, nucleotides, or ions.
The BRAIN initiative Church was part of a team who, in a 2012 scientific commentary, proposed a Brain Activity Map, later named BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies).