Profile of George M. Church

George Church wants to rewrite the genetic code. A virtual manual of protein synthesis, the code reflects how organisms interpret strings of letters in the genome into strings of amino acids in proteins. Exploiting the code's redundancy, Church, a recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, hopes to alter the genetic code of bacteria to enable the production of proteins with unnatural amino acids, a step toward radical genome tailoring that could someday lead to a range of applications in medicine and microbiology. To that end, Church's graduate student, Marc Lajoie, peers into a laboratory plate containing bacterial cells, illuminated by a light box in the glass-walled genetics department. As the cells glow lime-green, Lajoie smiles, pleased that his attempt to rid the code of a redundant instruction is well under way. By deleting the instruction, a triplet of nucleotide bases that normally serves as a stop sign for protein synthesis, from the bacterial genome, Church and his team can repurpose the so-called “stop codon.” They can reinsert the codon into bacteria as an instruction to incorporate a synthetic amino acid into proteins, thus helping engineer superorganisms. Such organisms could help produce improved drugs for diseases and fend off viruses that plague vaccine manufacturing plants. With his talent for decoding and reconstituting genomes—the genetics equivalent of deconstruction—Church has helped redefine the field of recombinant DNA technology. George M. Church. Born on MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida, Church spent a childhood marked by interests in mathematics, mineralogy, and entomology. “When I was 8, I was curious about insect metamorphosis and would rush to the library to learn about metamorphic processes I had observed,” he recalls. Before long, his scientific curiosity extended to computers, years before personal computers became …