GEORGE CHURCH
Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA Senior Associate,
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard PHOTO BY SETH KROLLIn 1973, after trying out two other groups, George Church finally found the perfect fit in Sung-Hou Kim’s X-ray crystallography lab, where he spent his second (and final) year as a Duke University undergraduate. “It was all of the things I was interested in—physics, math, biology, chemistry, and computers—in one. Kim had just come from MIT and was young and full of energy,” says Church, now a professor of genetics at Harvard University. “He saw a spark in me that few people had noticed before, and he treated me almost as an equal. I started to blossom in that lab.”
Church knew that he wanted to go to graduate school, and had already applied to the microbiology PhD program at Duke when he began to work with Kim. “I thought I should stay at the same university because I was young and immature.” Church began his PhD at Duke while continuing to work alongside Kim, with whom he would soon publish five papers, including one on modeling DNA-protein interactions and another on the three-dimensional structure of transfer RNAs. Twelve months into his microbiology PhD, Church decided instead to pursue a degree in biochemistry, but was booted out at the beginning of 1976. The biochemistry curriculum didn’t capture his interest any more than microbiology’s had, and after he’d flunked two courses, even Kim could not convince ...
