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In 2017, Harvard University genomics pioneer George Church teamed up with two young scientists to launch Nebula Genomics, a sequencing service with an emphasis on transparency with regard to how genomic data are used. Now, in an effort to bring more attention to issues surrounding data ownership, the company is putting Church’s genome up for auction as a nonfungible token (NFT), a form of cryptocurrency that provides proof of ownership of a digital or physical object and has shot to popularity in recent years with the rise of blockchain technology.
Church’s genome was the one of the first to be sequenced, and it was the first to be made publicly available, along with his medical records, multiomics data, and other information, as part of the Personal Genome Project (PGP) he launched in 2005. “The NFT was not my idea, but hopefully it is a good idea,” ...
