From the Scientist at Work column:Dr. Church — a tall man with a long graying beard and rumpled clothes — oversees 45 students in his lab and has co-founded or advises some 22 businesses, many of them startups that focus on things like synthetic biology, genetic sequencing and companies that provide genetic testing to consumers.
His most visible work is the Personal Genome Project, which has 16,000 volunteers, 12 of whom have had their genomes sequenced and made publicly available. These include science and technology celebrities like the Internet pioneer Esther Dyson and the Harvard psychologist and best-selling author Steven Pinker.
Eventually Dr. Church wants to sequence the entire genomes of 100,000 people — nearly every one of the six billion As, Cs, Gs and Ts that occur in a human.
“The goal of getting your genome done is not to tell you what you will die from,” he said, “but it’s how to learn how to take action to prevent disease.”