George M. Church

George McDonald Church (born August 28, 1954) is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, and chemist. As of 2015, he is Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT, and was a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

George McDonald Church was born on August 28, 1954 on MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida, and grew up in nearby Clearwater; he attended high school at the preparatory boarding school Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1968 to 1972. He then studied at Duke University, completing a bachelor'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 with Church in a graduate biochemistry program at Duke on an NSF fellowship. As Peter Miller reported 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. It was groundbreaking research, but Church spent so much time in the lab—up to a hundred hours a week—that he neglected his other classes [in the fall of 1975]".

As a result, Church was not compliant with Duke graduate academic policies, and was withdrawn from the degree program in January 1976.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." The work gave rise to publications that include a Proceedings 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, 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).

After completing his doctoral work, Church spent 6 months of 1984 at Biogen, the industrial laboratory site where Prof. 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, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and joint-discover of a technique to extract mouse embryonic stem cells.

Church joined the Harvard Medical School faculty as an assistant professor in 1986. In his subsequent research career, Church is now the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and to Member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology faculty, described as a "unique collaboration... integrat[ing] science, medicine and engineering to solve problems in human health" at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) at MIT. As well, he was a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. In these positions Church, as of May 2014, is reported to have co-authored more than 330 publications, 60 patents, and a popular science book.

Church has also served as director of the Center on Bioenergy Technology at Harvard, funded by a multiyear award from the U.S. Department of Energy. and of the Center of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS) at Harvard, funded by a P50-type award from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), a part of the National Institutes of Health.

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." Among these, 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). As of 2015, according to Google Scholar, his most cited research has been published in peer reviewed scientific journals including PNAS, Nature genetics, nature reviews geneticsthe Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference, Nature Biotechnology, Science, the Journal of Molecular Biology, the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB) conference, the Journal of Bacteriology,Nature, Nature Methods, Genome Biology, Bioinformatics, PLOS Genetics, and Nucleic Acids Research.

Genome sequencing and interpretation technologies

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 2005. Church also helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984. He invented the broadly applied concepts of molecular multiplexing and barcode tags. Technology transfer from his Harvard laboratory of automated sequencing and software to Genome Therapeutics Corp. resulted in the first bacterial genome sequence and first commercial genome (the human pathogen Helicobacter pylori) in 1994. Church was also co-inventor of nanopore sequencing in 1995, which are 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, in 2005, initiated the Personal Genome Project (PGP), which provides 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.

Synthetic biology and genome engineering

He 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 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 Emanuelle 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

He was part of a team of six who, in a 2012 scientific commentary, proposed a Brain Activity Map, later named BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies). They outlined specific experimental techniques that might be used to achieve what they termed a "functional connectome", as well as new technologies that will have to be developed in the course of the project, including wireless, minimally invasive methods to detect and manipulate neuronal activity, either utilizing microelectronics or synthetic biology. In one such proposed method, enzymatically produced DNA would serve as a "ticker tape record" of neuronal activity.

Woolly Mammoth cloning

In March 2015, Church and his genetics research team at Harvard successfully copied woolly mammoth genes into the genome of an Asian elephant. Using the CRISPR DNA editing technique, his group spliced genetic segments from frozen mammoth specimens, including genes from the ears, subcutaneous fat, and hair attributes, into the DNA of skin cells from a modern elephant. This marked the first time that woolly mammoth genes had been functionally active since the species became extinct. Their work has not been subject to peer review, however. Church stated that "Just making a DNA change isn't that meaningful. We want to read out the phenotypes." To do that, the team plans to perform further tests to get the hybrid cells into becoming specialized tissues, and from there attempting to turn the hybrid elephant/mammoth skin cells into hybrid embryos that can be grown in artificial wombs.

Technology transfer and translational impact

Church has co-founded 9 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), Pathogenica (microbe and viral NGS diagnostics, 2009, with Yemi Adesokan), AbVitro (immunomes, 2010, with Francois Vigneault and Mirza Cifric), Gen9 Bio (synthetic biology, 2009, with Joseph Jacobson and Drew Endy), EnEvolv (Genome Engineering), Joule Unlimited (SolarFuels, 2007, with Noubar Afeyan and David Berry), and LS9 (green chemistry, 2005, with Chris Somerville, Jay Keasling, Vinod Khosla, Noubar Afeyan, and David Berry)

He has participated in technology development, licensing patents and advising most of the Next-Generation Sequencing companies, including Complete Genomics, Life Technologies, Illumina, Danaher Corporation, Roche Diagnostics, Pacific Biosciences, Genia, and Nabsys.

Support of open consent

Church spearheaded the concept and implementation of open access sequencing hardware and shareable human medical data. He has noted the potential for re-identification of human research participants and the tendency for consent forms to be opaque – proposing an alternative "open consent" mechanism. He has participated in the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, cautioning about the risk of synthetic DNA and proposing risk-reduction via licensing and surveillance. His laboratory has a major bio-safety engineering focus.

Church at TED 2010, picture by Steve Jurvetson.

Support of open education

He has been an early advocate of online, open education since 2002. He is advisor to the Personal Genetics Education Project and has spent a day teaching at The Jemicy School. He has championed citizen science, especially in the fields of synthetic biology and personal genomics. Since 2008, his team has been hosting an annual Genomes, Environments and Traits (GET) Conference with free online videos.

Controversies

In response to a question from Der Spiegel, Church speculated that it could be technically possible to make a Neanderthal by reconstructing the DNA of a Neanderthal and modifying living human cells accordingly. Other media such as The Daily Mail fabricated a "Want-Ad" and quote for Church as having said: "Now I need an adventurous female human."Church pointed out that he was not working on such a project.

In his science and popular efforts, Church has also promoted open access genome sequencing and shareable human medical data, as well as online, open education and citizen science. Controversy found Church in early 2013, in response to his spoken speculations as to what was required to engineer the birth of a Neanderthal.

Church authored the 2012 NewScientist "top science book," Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves with Ed Regis. He has participated in news interviews and videos including at TED, TEDx, and TEDMED venues, at PBS's Charlie Rose, Faces of America, and NOVA, as well as at PopSci, EG, and The Colbert Report. He is a regular contributor to Edge.org publications and videos.

Church has received accolades including election to the National Academy of Sciences (in 2011), and the National Academy of Engineering (in 2012). He received the American Society for Microbiology Promega Biotechnology Research Award and the heptannual Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science of the Franklin Institute. He authored the NewScientist "top science book," Regenesis (on synthetic biology) with Ed Regis. Church is a regular contributor to Edge.org and has appeared widely in the media, including TED venues, NOVA, Faces of America, and Charlie Rose on PBS, and on The Colbert Report.

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). Newsweek picked Church for their 2008 “Power of Ideas” recognition in the category of Medicine (for the Personal Genome Project). In September 2010, Dr Church was honored for his work in genetics with the Mass High Tech All-Star Award.

He is a member of the Research Advisory Board of SENS Research Foundation.

Church is married to fellow Harvard Medical School faculty in genetics, Ting Wu.

Church has been outspoken in his support of following a vegan lifestyle, for reasons concerned with health, and with environmental and moral issues. When asked about his dietary choice, Church replied, "I've been vegan off-and-on since 1974 when I was inspired by participating in an MIT nutritional study, and quite strictly since 2004." 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. It's a pity to lose parts of our humanity and planet just due to a lack of recipes."[dead link]

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).