Here is how to get an appointment with George M. Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, director of four organizations devoted to genomics, cofounder of four biotech firms within the past four years, scientific adviser to 17 ultralow-cost genome sequencing companies, and founder of the Personal Genome Project:
First, you send him an e-mail requesting a meeting. He will reply with the URL for a Web site that lists his current schedule. This, when printed out, proves to be a 10-page, single-spaced document in very small type that starts with “January 1, 2009: Holiday, New Year’s Day” and ends with “September 17, 2010: International Steven Hoogendijk Award 2010 for G. Church, Rotterdam, Netherlands.” Searching through hundreds of entries—as many as nine falling on a single day—you try to find an uncommitted hour. If successful, you contact either of Church’s two administrative assistants to propose a date, time, and place. Then you hope for the best.
When the magical day arrives, the first question I ask Church is how he can possibly direct, create, advise, and mastermind so many projects (as well as teach classes and supervise Ph.D. dissertations) without going crazy. “Well, I think it’s an assumption that I’m not crazy,” he says. “They all seem pretty much the same to me. They’re all integrated, and I guess what we try to do is—we try to do integration.”
If Church’s career has a single integrating theme, it is finding ways to apply the machinery of automation to the molecular basis of life, the genome. His infatuation with computers goes back to grammar school in Clearwater, Florida, when, at age 9, he built an electronic computer for a science fair. Genetics entered the picture in the spring of 1974. Then an undergraduate at Duke, Church typed into a computer all the transfer RNA sequences that were available at the time and folded each one into a three-dimensional structure, as RNA molecules were known to do. “I became obsessed with sequencing,” he says. The obsession never faded. Today his myriad projects all emerge from his impulse to know, unravel, depict, use, and—better yet—tinker with and even create the RNA and DNA codes that constitute the software of living systems.
That ambition has resulted in a raft of Church-inspired technological innovations. His automated genome-sequencing machine is driving the price of mapping a person’s entire genetic code down toward $1,000, almost unbelievably cheap considering that, less than a decade ago, the government-funded Human Genome Project spent roughly $3 billion to sequence a single genome. Low-cost sequencing has allowed Church to embark on a second venture, the Personal Genome Project (PGP), which aims to sequence the genomes of 100,000 volunteers for free. The project would provide the first extensive genome database that matches DNA to a wide range of traits—not merely physical attributes like height or eye color but also disease histories and personalities. The idea is to help inaugurate the field of personalized medicine, in which each individual would receive preventions and treatments tailored to his or her specific genetic makeup, along with predictions of future health issues.
