Personal Genome Project

People

Founder & Principal Investigator

George M. Church, PhD
Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School
and Director of the Center for Computational Genetics
Biographical Information

Staff and Affiliates

Jason Bobe (community, planning)
Jeantine Lunshof (ELSI)
Greg Porreca (co-inventor, polony sequencing)
Jay Shendure (co-inventor, polony sequencing)
Richard Terry (engineering)
Joe Thakuria (medical)
Daniel Vorhaus (ELSI)
Alexander Wait Zaranek (biophysics, computer science)
Kun Zhang (sequencing)

Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB)

Terry Bard, MD
Nan Laird, PhD
Cynthia Morton, PhD
Alexandra E. Shields, PhD

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Advice and Support

The PGP has received grants for biomedical research from:

• The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT

The PGP has received financial support in the form of unrestricted gifts from:

• Google
• COUQ Foundation
• Orbimed

Relevant grants for technology development (restricted to non-human-subjects related activities) from:

• DOE GTL
• NIH NHGRI CEGS

The PGP has received unrestricted royalty donations via Harvard and George Church from:

• Applied Biosystems
• Agencourt
• Helicos
• Lynx (Solexa/Illumina)
• Complete Genomics Inc.

The PGP has benefitted from considerable technological help and advice from some of the companies above as well as DanaherMotion, Enzymatics Inc., and others listed on our 2nd generation sequencing page. We are grateful to these companies who understand and support this experiment in non-profit, open-source hardware, software, and wetware and open-access data.

Operational support and services have been provided by numerous entities, including Brigham and Women's Hospital, Coriell Institute, Broad Institute, Dr. Yuan Gao at VCU, and the Alan & Priscilla Oppenheimer Foundation.

We are grateful to the law firms Robinson Bradshaw & Hinson and Goodwin Procter for their support.

PGP volunteers have donated tissue, personal information, advice and in many cases, funding.

The open access database approach to comprehensive and integrated gene, environment, and trait data has been approved by the following Institutional Review Boards (IRB):

• Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine
• MIT
• Partner's Healthcare
• University of California San Diego (UCSD).

Similar human-subjects research protocols are being submitted in Germany, China, and Canada and will be posted here when they are approved.