George Church, the personal genome project and Knome, a whole genome sequencing company

Technology Review talks to George Church about gene sequencing and the first commercial whole-genome sequencing service he launched last week with his startup Knome, based in Cambridge, MA.

He is spearheading the Personal Genome Project, a nonprofit effort to make both the DNA sequence and the health records of many individuals publicly available. The project, which is now recruiting 100,000 people to have parts of their genomes sequenced, aims to serve as a test bed for technological, security, and ethical issues that might arise with the growing personal-genomics field. Church is also a cofounder of Knome, and he sits on the science advisory board of both Knome and 23andMe.