John Craig Venter is an American biotechnologist and businessman. He is known for leading one of the first draft sequences of the human genome and assembled the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome. Venter founded Celera Genomics,the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). He was the co-founder of Human Longevity Inc. and Synthetic Genomics. He was listed on Time magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2010,the British magazine New Statesman listed Craig Venter at 14th in the list of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010". In 2012,Venter was honored with Dan David Prize for his contribution to genome research. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2013. He is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.
Celera is a subsidiary of Quest Diagnostics which focuses on genetic sequencing and related technologies. It was founded in 1998 as a business unit of Applera,spun off into an independent company in 2008,and finally acquired by Quest Diagnostics in 2011.
The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard,often referred to as the Broad Institute,is a biomedical and genomic research center located in Cambridge,Massachusetts,United States. The institute is independently governed and supported as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization under the name Broad Institute Inc.,and it partners with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Harvard University,and the five Harvard teaching hospitals.
William James Kent is an American research scientist and computer programmer. He has been a contributor to genome database projects and the 2003 winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award.
George McDonald Church 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. Through his Harvard lab Church has co-founded around 50 biotech companies pushing the boundaries of innovation in the world of life sciences and making his lab as a hotbed of biotech startup activity in Boston. In 2018,the Church lab at Harvard made a record by spinning off 16 biotech companies in one year. The Church lab works on research projects that are distributed in diverse areas of modern biology like developmental biology,neurobiology,info processing,medical genetics,genomics,gene therapy,diagnostics,chemistry &bioengineering,space biology &space genetics,and ecosystem. Research and technology developments at the Church lab 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,and was listed among the top 8 famous geneticists of all time in human history. As of January 2023,Church serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors.
The Baskin School of Engineering,known simply as Baskin Engineering,is the school of engineering at the University of California,Santa Cruz. It consists of six departments:Applied Mathematics,Biomolecular Engineering,Computational Media,Computer Science and Engineering,Electrical and Computer Engineering,and Statistics.
The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA,and of identifying,mapping and sequencing all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint. It started in 1990 and was completed in 2003. It remains the world's largest collaborative biological project. Planning for the project started after it was adopted in 1984 by the US government,and it officially launched in 1990. It was declared complete on April 14,2003,and included about 92% of the genome. Level "complete genome" was achieved in May 2021,with a remaining only 0.3% bases covered by potential issues. The final gapless assembly was finished in January 2022.
Vamsi K. Mootha is an Indian-born American physician-scientist and computational biologist. He is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute,Professor of Systems Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School,Investigator in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also an Institute Member of the Broad Institute.
Pardis Christine Sabeti is an American computational biologist,medical geneticist,and evolutionary geneticist. She is a professor in the Center for Systems Biology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and on the faculty of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health,and is an institute member at the Broad Institute and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Applied Biosystems is one of various brands under the Life Technologies brand of Thermo Fisher Scientific corporation. The brand is focused on integrated systems for genetic analysis,which include computerized machines and the consumables used within them.
Applera Corporation of Norwalk,Connecticut,at #874 on the 2007 Fortune 1000 list,was one of the largest international biotechnology companies based in the United States. It was the successor company to what was the Life Sciences Division of Perkin-Elmer Corporation. Applera was not publicly traded,but instead it consisted of two major groups which are publicly traded tracking stocks in the proteomics industrial sector. These two groups were the S&P 500 listed Applera Corp-Applied Biosystems Group of Foster City,California,and Applera Corp-Celera Genomics Group of Rockville,Maryland. In 2006,the company spun off the Celera Genomics group and changed its name from Applera to Applied Biosystems.
Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers,Jr. is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician,who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis.
Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American chemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing,and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. Doudna was one of the first women to share a Nobel in the sciences. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry,with Emmanuelle Charpentier,"for the development of a method for genome editing." She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the department of chemistry and the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California,Berkeley. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.
Feng Zhang is a Chinese–American biochemist. Zhang currently holds the James and Patricia Poitras Professorship in Neuroscience at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and in the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also has appointments with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is most well known for his central role in the development of optogenetics and CRISPR technologies.
Mark Joseph Daly is Director of the Finnish Institute for Molecular Medicine (FIMM) at the University of Helsinki,a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School,Chief of the Analytic and Translational Genetic Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital,and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In the early days of the Human Genome Project,Daly helped develop the genetic model by which linkage disequilibrium could be used to map the haplotype structure of the human genome. In addition,he developed statistical methods to find associations between genes and disorders such as Crohn's disease,inflammatory bowel disease,autism and schizophrenia.
Manolis Kellis is a professor of Computer Science and Computational Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is the head of the Computational Biology Group at MIT and is a Principal Investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT.
The He Jiankui affair is a scientific and bioethical controversy concerning the use of genome editing following its first use on humans by Chinese scientist He Jiankui,who edited the genomes of human embryos in 2018. He became widely known on 26 November 2018 after he announced that he had created the first human genetically edited babies. He was listed in the Time's 100 most influential people of 2019. The affair led to ethical and legal controversies,resulting in the indictment of He and two of his collaborators,Zhang Renli and Qin Jinzhou. He eventually received widespread international condemnation.
He Jiankui is a Chinese biophysicist who was an associate professor in the Department of Biology of the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen,China. Earning his Ph.D. from Rice University in Texas on protein evolution,including that of CRISPR,He learned gene-editing techniques (CRISPR/Cas9) as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University in California.
CRISPR gene editing is a genetic engineering technique in molecular biology by which the genomes of living organisms may be modified. It is based on a simplified version of the bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 antiviral defense system. By delivering the Cas9 nuclease complexed with a synthetic guide RNA (gRNA) into a cell,the cell's genome can be cut at a desired location,allowing existing genes to be removed and/or new ones added in vivo.
DNA:The Story of Life is a four-part Channel 4 documentary series on the discovery of DNA,broadcast in 2003.
