Philip Goelet, Ph.D. Chairman

Philip has extensive experience as a scientist, entrepreneur and investor. His scientific career started at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB, Cambridge UK) under the supervision of Jon Karn in the laboratory of Sydney Brenner, where he sequenced tobacco mosaic virus as part of his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He then pursued postdoctoral research in neuroscience at Columbia University with Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel. Prior to co-founding Acidophil, Philip co-founded and managed Molecular Tool (Baltimore, MD: pioneering single nucleotide polymorphism analysis, acquired by Orchid Biosciences) and RiboTargets (Cambridge UK: therapeutics based upon targeting RNA, merged with Vernalis). In parallel to co-founding Acidophil with Sydney Brenner, Philip co-founded Red Abbey Venture Partners, a health care private equity fund with Frank Bonsal and Matt Zuga.

Sydney Brenner, M.D., Ph.D. (1927-2019)

Sydney was a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences, a recipient of the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award, 1971, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2002 for his pioneering work in genetics and molecular biology. He participated in the discovery of messenger RNA and, with Francis Crick, showed that the genetic code was composed of triplets. As an entrepreneur he cofounded Lynx Therapeutics (merged with Solexa and then was acquired by Illumina), Combichem (acquired by DuPont), Acidophil (innovation partnership with Philip Goelet) and Population Genetics. After receiving his MD from the University of Witwatersrand and his DPhil in Chemistry from Oxford University, Sydney began his career in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and became the Director of its successor, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in 1979. He became the Director of the MRC Unit of Molecular Genetics in 1987, retiring in 1992. He founded and directed the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley and he was the founding president of the Okinawa Institution of Science. Most recently, he was a Janelia Senior Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a Distinguished Research Professor of The Salk Institute, La Jolla, California and founded and led the Molecular Engineering Lab at A*STAR Singapore. Sydney passed away on April 5, 2019.