George Church
George Church is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a professor at MIT, where he leads the Church Lab and serves as a founding core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. He is the co-founder and lead geneticist of Colossal Biosciences, a company focused on de-extinction and conservation through genetic engineering. He is best known for his pioneering contributions to genomics, including developing the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984, helping initiate the Human Genome Project, and advancing CRISPR-based genome editing for applications including woolly mammoth de-extinction.
“$12B valuation, $635M raised including a $400M round that doubled from its $200M target. 260+ employees, 55,000 sq ft Texas HQ, six species in de-extinction portfolio, three sets of live engineered animals produced.”
Source→“Astromech builds predictive models of biological change trained on 3.8 billion years of evolutionary history. Applications span cancer, drug resistance, biosecurity, agriculture, and conservation.”
Source→“George Church thinks he can make a woolly mammoth. And we're pretty sure that that's worth something — that was like the original deck.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.