Dr. George Church is a geneticist, molecular engineer, and visionary whose work continually reshapes the landscape of biotechnology. A professor at Harvard and MIT, he has been at the forefront of synthetic biology, gene editing, and de-extinction efforts, driven not by commercial ambition but by an insatiable curiosity and a belief that the most audacious scientific ideas can become reality. His work does not simply seek to understand life but to reimagine it, to push beyond what nature has dictated and into the realm of what is possible.
I photographed Church on October 11, 2023, near his home in Boston, MA. It was still the time of COVID, so instead of an indoor session, we walked the Riverway by Longwood Bridge. The season was in full splendor, crisp air, dry leaves crackling underfoot, golden autumn light filtering through the branches. Church, with his signature long beard and contemplative gaze, seemed perfectly at home in the moment. And, in a touch that felt both poetic and utterly fitting, he had brought with him a fossilized woolly mammoth claw, an artifact of deep time held by a man working to bring such creatures back to life.
Our conversation moved as easily as our steps, ranging across the many companies he has started, ventures aimed not at financial gain but at creation, at solving problems others have not dared to tackle. For Church, science is not a discipline of rigid boundaries but an ever-expanding frontier. He has never been confined to the areas he originally studied; his intellectual reach spans genomics, bioengineering, and the radical possibility of reviving extinct species through projects like Revive & Restore. Where others see limits, he sees the latent potential of DNA, a biological code waiting to be rewritten.
What sets Church apart is not just the breadth of his knowledge but the depth of his vision. He is not content merely to understand the mechanisms of life, he wants to alter them, to use them as tools to address the grand challenges of our time. Medicine, conservation, even human longevity, no idea is too far-reaching, no question too ambitious. The future, in his mind, is not something that simply arrives; it is something we can shape.
As we walked, the city around us hummed with its usual rhythm, indifferent to the extraordinary ideas being discussed along its paths. Yet in the shifting colors of fall, in the ever-present motion of the season, there was a reminder of what Church himself embodies: the inevitability of change, the relentless force of innovation. To walk beside him, even for an afternoon, was to glimpse a world still in the making.
