Dr. Daniel Branton, Harvard’s Higgins Professor of Biology, Emeritus, and his collaborators Dr. David Deamer and Dr. Mark Akeson at the University of California, Santa Cruz, are among the 2023 Golden Goose Award winners for their invention and research developing Nanopore Sequencing.
“The Golden Goose Awards are awarded to research that sounded like too esoteric an idea at first but has since in fact had a major impact on society,” says Branton. First given out in 2012, they were an answer to the short-sightedness of the mockery of the “Golden Fleece” that suggested basic research had no benefit to greater society and should not be the beneficiaries of government grants.
“It’s wonderful to see Dan Branton recognized for inventing and developing this transformative technology,” says Rachelle Gaudet, Professor and Chair of Molecular and Cellular Biology. “I remember learning about the nanopore sequencing project as a postdoc in the Department in the late 1990s, and being fascinated by the concept and blown away by the early experiments that hinted that it may actually work someday. I appreciate that MCB, and Harvard more broadly, are communities that value and invest in basic research and bold ideas. We sometimes make the biggest leaps from the weird curiosity-driven corners of biology, something that Dan has demonstrated multiple times in his illustrious research career.”
