Steven Benner has developed the fields of paleogenetics, evolutionary bioinformatics, astrobiology, and synthetic biology, working at Harvard, the ETH Zurich, and the University of Florida before establishing the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution (Alachua) and Firebird Biomolecular Sciences LLC. His synthetic biology has had over $1.3 billion in medical applications and is currently used in coronavirus detection. His laboratory has resurrected 3-billion-year-old proteins in Jurassic Park experiments and helped define how life may have arisen on Earth and Mars. He earned Bachelors’s and Masters’s Degrees in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry (Yale), and a Ph.D. in Chemistry (Harvard). Outside of science, Steven bicycled across the North American continent, 6083 kilometers in all.
Steven’s ventures finance the initial development of ALF.