Jonathan Rothberg

Jonathan Rothberg is best known for inventing high-speed, massively parallel DNA sequencing—an idea that came to him after his infant son was rushed to intensive care and he realized how critical individual genome sequencing was to human health. Rothberg’s invention introduced the era of personal genomes and is now in use at major pharmaceutical companies, universities, genome centers, and medical centers around the world. He subsequently founded 454 Life Sciences to enable the sequencing of individual humans, and he led the effort to complete the first sequence of an individual human genome, successfully sequencing James D. Watson’s genome. Under his tenure, 454 Life Sciences worked with collaborators to crack the mystery behind the disappearance of the honey bee, uncover a new virus killing transplant patients, and elucidate the extent of individual human variation. Realizing that scientists needed a direct way to take information from any biological system and translate it into a digital format, Rothberg created Ion Torrent to link the language of chemistry and the binary language of computers. He also developed the Ion Torrent chip, a novel semiconductor device that creates a portal between the two worlds.