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Pioneer in Synthetic Biology discusses how to be a successful innovator
George Church helped revolutionized the study of DNA by exponentially reducing the cost of sequencing it. George Church came up with an idea he called “multiplexing” to sequence dozens to millions of pieces of DNA simultaneously—processing them all in the same tube—rather than one at a time, which had been the accepted method.
George McDonald Church is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, and chemist. He is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT, and founding core member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. He is widely regarded as a pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology. Church has co-authored more than 290 publications and 50 patents. Church is or has been involved in founding many very successful (13 biotech) startups.
Over many decades George Church has shown a pattern of inspiration and persistence that became a creative habit.
“I'll drop something for a while, a year or maybe several years, and then pick it up again,” he says. “I think that's the way successful innovators work. They keep juggling ideas, keeping them in the air, in the back of their mind, to inspire them or enable new recombinations.”
He devotes most of his energy to encouraging his team to innovate.
“A lot of people can't be bothered with innovation,” he says. “It's a nuisance, in certain ways. It usually brings a lot of anxiety and other problems—the kinds of things that prevent the average person from setting aside the time and taking the risks.” But for Church's lab, there's no alternative, he says. It's the only way forward.
Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/06/pioneer-in-synthetic-biology-discusses.html
