How Adrian Woolfson Is Helping Medicine Move From Reading DNA to Writing It

There was a time, not that long ago, when the idea of writing a genome from scratch sat closer to science fiction than to medicine.

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Biology had, for most of its modern history, been a reading discipline. You could sequence DNA. You could describe it. You could publish catalogs of the genes that made an organism what it was. From the 1980s onward, a series of techniques gradually made it possible to edit DNA too, with progressively better aim and progressively smaller side effects. But actually writing a genome, meaning designing nucleotide sequences on a computer and then building them in the physical world as functional chromosomes, remained something like the dream at the edge of the field. It was the part of the future that the textbooks kept describing without quite arriving at.

Adrian Woolfson is helping change that.

Not alone, not without controversy, and not without making claims that will almost certainly invite the same kinds of arguments that follow every frontier technology into its first decade of public life. But if the question is how genome writing is moving from the scientific margins into serious biomedical conversation, Woolfson is one of the people whose career, publications, and public argumentation keep showing up in the middle of that story. Through his training at Oxford and Cambridge under a Nobel laureate, his two decades running oncology and genomic medicine programs inside the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, his three years as head of research and development at Sangamo Therapeutics during the clinical readout of the world’s first in vivo human genome-editing trial, and the biotechnology company he cofounded in San Diego to make genome writing a practical engineering discipline, he has quietly become one of the most useful voices explaining what the next phase of genomic medicine is actually going to look like.

That does not mean he has solved genome writing. It does mean he has helped make it feel like a field worth taking seriously, one that can be discussed not just in synthetic biology laboratories but in regulatory meetings, investor conversations, book reviews, and dinner-table arguments about what medicine in 2035 should be allowed to do.

This is the softer part of the Woolfson story. Before the harder questions, around biosafety, biosecurity, the ethics of authoring life, and what it means for a private company to design species, it is worth understanding why his particular combination of training, industry experience, and public voice puts him in the room for those arguments at all. Part II of this profile will examine the critiques and the open questions. Part I is about why the questions are being asked in the first place.

Before genome writing became a field

Synthetic biology is now a crowded idea. It is a conference circuit, a venture category, a set of foundation models, a source of headline-grabbing experiments with yeast and bacteria, and an ambition shared by researchers in laboratories from Cambridge to San Diego to Shenzhen. But that visibility is recent. Even a decade ago, the field looked very different.

For most of modern biomedicine, the work that mattered happened at the level of reading and editing. Frederick Sanger’s chain-termination method, published in 1977, gave the world the ability to determine the precise sequence of any strand of DNA. Over the following three decades, progressive generations of sequencing technology reduced the cost of reading a human genome from billions of dollars to a few hundred. The ability to change DNA, by contrast, lagged behind. Gene therapy, as a clinical field, stumbled through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, marked by setbacks and occasional tragedies. The arrival of programmable editing tools, first zinc finger nucleases, then TALENs, then CRISPR-Cas9 in 2012, transformed what was plausible. By the mid-2010s, it had become routine, at least in research settings, to alter small numbers of nucleotides at chosen locations in the genome of almost any organism.

Writing at scale was different. Alexander Todd and his colleague A. M. Michelson had synthesized the first artificial DNA fragment in 1955. It was two nucleotides long. A complete human genome contains roughly three billion nucleotide pairs. For most of the intervening seventy years, closing that gap was a slow and highly technical project of a small community of synthetic chemists and molecular biologists.

That community stayed small in part because the ambition was so large. Building a single gene from scratch was expensive. Building a whole genome was, for most of the twentieth century, essentially impossible. And even when the cost curves began to bend, the tools to design what to build, to know in advance which sequences would function as living systems, did not exist. Writing DNA without a design framework was a little like printing books in a language nobody could yet read.

Woolfson entered biology at a moment when this asymmetry was beginning to break. Not all at once, and not in a single laboratory, but in enough places, with enough force, that the people paying attention could feel the shift.

The Cambridge education

One of the reasons Woolfson became a useful voice in the genome writing conversation is that he did not arrive in it as an outsider. He arrived as someone whose intellectual formation was almost embarrassingly well suited to the moment.

He trained as a physician at Balliol College, Oxford, which is the kind of detail that looks like a biographical footnote until you notice how often it reappears in the stories of scientists who end up translating between bench and clinic. He then moved to Cambridge for his doctorate, at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in the laboratory of Cesar Milstein. Milstein had won the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for inventing the monoclonal antibody, the technology that eventually underwrote the modern era of cancer immunotherapy and most of the targeted biologics on the current market. To do a PhD in Milstein’s lab was to be embedded in what was, arguably, the most productive concentrated institution in the history of molecular biology. The MRC LMB has produced more than a dozen Nobel laureates. It is where DNA sequencing was invented, where the structure of the ribosome was resolved, and where, decades later, the synthetic genome project known as Syn61 would be completed.

Woolfson’s doctoral and postdoctoral work focused on CD1 genes, alternative splicing, and protein folding, the kind of detailed molecular biology that looks obscure at a distance and turns out, on closer inspection, to be exactly the vocabulary you need when you start trying to design synthetic organisms. He was the Charles and Katherine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge, and a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow. He completed his postgraduate medical training at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge.

None of this guarantees anything about a scientific career. What it does is establish that the person who later founded a synthetic genomics company was not an outsider arriving at biology with venture enthusiasm. He was a physician and molecular biologist who had done his earliest serious work inside one of the most storied institutions in the discipline, at a moment when the tools he would later need were being invented in rooms down the hall.

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From the bedside to the pipeline

Most scientists trained at that level follow one of two trajectories. They stay in academia and run a laboratory. Or they move into biotechnology and spend the rest of their career on a specific therapeutic program. Woolfson took a third route, which turned out to be more useful than either for the kind of work he is doing now.

From 2007 to 2013, he held roles of increasing responsibility at Bristol-Myers Squibb, first in London and then at the company’s Princeton, New Jersey headquarters. He led the global launch of dasatinib, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor for chronic myeloid leukemia, and worked across a portfolio of oncology programs. From 2013 to 2017, he was Global Clinical Leader for Early and Late Stage Immuno-Oncology and Hematology at Pfizer, based in New York, where he helped define the company’s hematology immuno-oncology strategy. In 2018, he became Chief Medical Officer of Nouscom, a venture-backed personalized cancer neoantigen vaccine company based in Basel and Rome.

What this decade-plus gave him, that a conventional academic career would not have, was a very specific kind of education. He learned how a therapy moves from a molecular hypothesis to a clinical trial design to a regulatory submission to a commercial launch. He learned what the failure modes look like at each stage. He learned the financial architecture of drug development and the grammar of dealing with regulators on three continents. He worked, in other words, inside the machinery that turns scientific ideas into medicines people can actually take, which is the part of the process that most translational scientists never see up close.

That experience would matter enormously for what came next.

The Sangamo years

On January 22, 2019, Sangamo Therapeutics, a publicly traded genomic medicine company based in Richmond, California, announced that Woolfson would join as Executive Vice President of Research and Development. The press release, which is the kind of document whose language usually matters more than it sounds, described the moment carefully. “This is a meaningful time to welcome Adrian to Sangamo,” the company said, “as we expect a significant flow of clinical data from our genomic medicines programs throughout 2019 and will advance new programs into first-in-human studies.”

The subtext was legible to anyone following the field. Fourteen months earlier, on November 13, 2017, at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, a forty-four-year-old Arizona man named Brian Madeux had become the first human being to receive a therapy designed to edit the DNA of cells directly inside his body. The therapy, called SB-913, was Sangamo’s. It used zinc finger nucleases delivered by a viral vector to insert a working copy of a gene into a precise location on chromosome 19, in an attempt to treat a rare metabolic condition called Hunter syndrome. The trial, known as CHAMPIONS, was the moment gene editing crossed the line from research promise to human experiment. It was one of the most consequential single events in the history of genomic medicine.

What Sangamo did not yet have, at the time of Woolfson’s arrival, was the clinical evidence to know whether the approach worked. That question would take several years to answer, and the answers would be complicated. Woolfson did not design the program that treated Brian Madeux. He arrived after it had begun, to lead the research and development organization through its clinical readout, to advance adjacent programs into first-in-human studies, and to figure out what a company whose core technology was editing human genomes would do next. Over the next three years, he oversaw a portfolio of gene therapy, gene editing, cell therapy, transcriptional regulation, and genome engineering programs. He was, in effect, the chief translational officer for one of the most ambitious early efforts to turn in vivo genome editing into an approvable medicine.

The lessons of those years were not the ones the public conversation about gene editing tended to emphasize. Editing DNA inside a living human being was, in the end, the easier half of the problem. The harder half was everything around it. Delivery vectors had to reach the right tissues. Immune systems had to tolerate the therapy. Regulators had to decide how to evaluate a class of treatments that defied existing frameworks. Manufacturing had to scale. Clinical benefit had to survive the realities of human biological variation. Some programs progressed. Others did not. The field, by the early 2020s, was noticeably more sober about timelines than it had been in 2017.

By the time Woolfson moved on from Sangamo, he had spent three years inside the operational reality of one of the most advanced genomic medicine companies in the world. What he had learned, he would say in subsequent writing and interviews, was that editing existing genomes would always be limited by the fact that you could only change what nature had already built. If you wanted a broader palette, you needed to be able to write.

The turn toward writing

Genyro, the company Woolfson cofounded in San Diego, was built on the thesis that three distinct technologies have reached maturity at roughly the same moment and that combining them produces something new.

The first is artificial intelligence, specifically the generation of foundation models trained on biological sequence data. The second is high-throughput DNA synthesis, the ability to construct long strands of DNA from scratch at commercial scale. The third is genome assembly, the set of laboratory techniques that take synthesized fragments and stitch them into complete, functional chromosomes inside living cells. Individually, each of these technologies has been under development for decades. Together, Woolfson has argued, they begin to make biology a predictable and programmable engineering material rather than a discovered one.

His 2025 paper in Molecular Therapy, titled “ABI and generative biology: a new paradigm for gene therapy, genome engineering, and engineered cell therapy,” outlines the clinical case. ABI, for Artificial Biological Intelligence, is his preferred term for the system that results when AI foundation models are paired with physical DNA construction at scale. The paper argues that ABI will compress the timelines of drug development, reduce costs, and widen the target space of next-generation therapeutics, particularly in the categories of disease where current gene therapy has struggled to deliver.

The language Woolfson uses to describe this shift is distinctive. In a conversation with the cardiologist and writer Eric Topol on the Ground Truths podcast in 2026, he called the convergence a “second genesis” and described genome writing as a “molecular Gutenberg press.” The word he uses in his book for the moment when humanity stops inheriting genomes and starts authoring them is “artivolution,” a coinage meant to mark the break from the Darwinian framework that has governed biology for four billion years. These are not small claims. They also are not, in the context of what has been published in the peer-reviewed literature over the last thirty-six months, as audacious as they would have sounded a decade ago.

The ensemble at Genyro

One reason Genyro is worth paying attention to, independent of Woolfson, is that his cofounders are among the most productive scientists working on the constituent pieces of the problem.

Brian Hie, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford and an Innovation Investigator at the Arc Institute, leads the AI layer. In early 2025, Hie and his collaborators published Evo 2, a genome foundation model trained on more than nine trillion nucleotides of DNA sequence. The model can predict the functional consequences of previously unseen mutations, design proteins that fold correctly, and generate plausible genome sequences from prompts. It is, in the most literal sense, a large language model for biology, where the language is DNA.

Kaihang Wang, now at Caltech, runs the synthesis side. Wang was the senior author on the 2019 Nature paper describing Syn61, the synthetic E. coli genome with a recoded genetic code using 61 codons rather than the usual 64, which was the largest synthetic genome ever built at the time and the first to demonstrate that the fundamental grammar of the genetic code was negotiable. In 2025, Wang and his colleagues published the Sidewinder DNA construction technology in Nature, a method that allows researchers to write DNA of any specified sequence at a fraction of the cost and time of previous platforms. If Evo 2 is the design software, Sidewinder is the printer.

Woolfson’s role, on this team, is the clinical and translational layer. He is the cofounder who has run first-in-human trials of genome editing, who has sat across the table from regulators, and who has built and run global medical organizations at BMS, Pfizer, Nouscom, and Sangamo. He is the person whose job it is to translate whatever the AI models and the synthesis platforms produce into something a regulator can evaluate and a patient can eventually receive. That is the hardest part of the work, and it is the part that most academic synthetic biology laboratories do not have the organizational muscle to attempt.

The writer who also writes

Not many scientists become narrators of their own fields. Woolfson, like Sinclair before him, is one of them.

He is the author of three books. Life Without Genes: The History and Future of Genomes was published by HarperCollins in 2000. An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Genetics followed from Duckworth in 2006. His new book, On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence, was published by Bloomsbury and MIT Press in February 2026. He has authored more than 160 scientific papers, book chapters, reviews, and patents. He is the Book Reviews Editor at the peer-reviewed journal GEN Biotechnology. He is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and Science magazine, and writes for the London Review of Books, Prospect, the Washington Post, the Literary Review, the Spectator, Nature, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, the Evening Standard, Daedalus, and the Financial Times.

That is an unusual resume for a sitting chief executive of a venture-backed biotechnology company. It is also part of what makes him useful. The metaphors he has introduced into the public conversation about synthetic biology, Fred’s Library (his preferred name, after Frederick Sanger, for the imaginary Borgesian library of all possible DNA sequences), the molecular Gutenberg press, Artificial Biological Intelligence, the second genesis, the artivolution, are doing real work in a field that has struggled to explain itself to the public. A recent essay adapted from his new book and published in The MIT Press Reader makes the case in its clearest form. The central image is Borges’s 1941 short story “The Library of Babel,” in which an infinite library contains every possible book that could be written with an alphabet of twenty-five characters. Woolfson argues that biology has a similar library, where the alphabet is the four nucleotide bases of DNA, and that humans are on the verge of acquiring the tools to chart it.

What he believes is at stake, on his own account, is not small. “It should be possible to meet most of humanity’s needs through biologically inspired designs,” he told Topol, “to solve many global problems, revolutionize health care, extend human lifespan, and create other organisms to order.” Whether the reader finds that prospect exciting, alarming, or both is not the point. The point is that a scientist with his training, his institutional experience, and his public voice is making the argument at all, in terms concrete enough to be debated rather than merely admired.

The frontier he is helping define

It would be wrong to say that Adrian Woolfson made genome writing real. Many scientists built the field before him and alongside him, and many others are pushing it forward now without his involvement. But it would also be wrong to understate the effect of his particular combination of training, industry experience, and public writing on how the rest of us are able to think about what is happening.

He helped move synthetic genomics from a specialist research agenda toward a discussable biomedical frontier. He helped articulate a vocabulary for talking about genome writing that policymakers, investors, and general readers can actually use. He helped demonstrate, through his Sangamo years and his company’s scientific roster, that the same institutions and regulatory frameworks that govern conventional drug development can, with effort, be extended to the strange new category of therapeutics that write DNA rather than read or edit it. And he has done all of this while continuing to publish book reviews in the Wall Street Journal, which is the kind of detail that turns a career into a recognizable public voice rather than an organizational title.

That is why Part I of the Woolfson story matters. Before the arguments over biosafety, biosecurity, intellectual property, and what it means for a private company to author organisms that have never existed, there is the simpler and more durable fact that he has helped make genome writing one of the most intellectually alive topics in modern biomedical science.

Part II of this profile will examine the critiques, the open questions, and the harder part of what the field is being asked to confront. That is the conversation Woolfson himself has been working to start. It is worth having carefully.

Continue to Part II: Adrian Woolfson and the Battle Over the Future of Genome Writing.

References and further reading

• On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence (MIT Press, 2026)
• HealthcareDiscovery.ai reading of On the Future of Species
• Genyro
• Sangamo Therapeutics appointment announcement, January 22, 2019
• ABI and generative biology: a new paradigm for gene therapy, genome engineering, and engineered cell therapy, Molecular Therapy, 2025
• Evo 2: genome foundation model, Nature, 2025
• Sidewinder DNA construction technology, Nature, 2025
• Syn61 synthetic E. coli genome, Nature, 2019
• Biological Babel: Why DNA Is Humanity’s Infinite Atlas, The MIT Press Reader, 2026
• On the Future of Species, in conversation with Eric Topol, Ground Truths, 2026
• Adrian Woolfson’s published book reviews

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