On Tuesday 18 February, we were honoured to welcome Sir Shankar Balasubramanian as our speaker for the sixth King Lecture at Clare Hall. Sir Shankar Balasubramanian is the Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and senior group leader at Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Institute. 

Sir Shankar’s lecture, titled ‘Reading your DNA,’ explored the journey and scientific foundations of developing his company Solexa (now Illumina) that has made routine, accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes a reality and has revolutionised biology.  

The International Human Genome Project used an approach developed by Fred Sanger to generate the first human genome reference in a global collaboration that spanned a decade. Over 20 years ago, during the course of some basic scientific experiments, a collaboration with Sir David Klenerman and co-workers, unexpectedly led Sir Shankar and his team to conceive and then pursue a different way of sequencing DNA. The initial experiments ultimately led to a rapid, low-cost sequencing approach, which was developed and commercialised through Solexa, co-founded with Sir David Klenerman. Today the technique is able to sequence human, and other, genomes at a cost and speed that shows over a million-fold improvement compared to the beginnings of the project in 1997.

The lecture was followed by a lively Q&A session with the audience, and continued conversation over dinner at Clare Hall.

A full recording of the lecture is available on our YouTube channel.