ON BOARD WITH Dr Jonathan Rothberg
Dr Jonathan Rothberg is a man on a mission. His goal is to “feed, fuel and heal the world”, a phrase he uses as a mantra as he leads me on an action-packed tour of his newest boat, Gene Chaser, on a hot day in June. It is the support vessel to the 55-metre Amels Gene Machine, which he took to the polar region in 2017. The trip showed the whole family, including his five children, a world that is being redrawn by global heating.
“You could talk to people that remembered when islands that we saw were peninsulas. Global warming was measurable and tangible to the whole family, and so we decided to put a laboratory on the ” he says. “Our goal was to use what nature had developed over the past four billion years of evolution and look for genetic elements that could help us with global warning and find genes that evolved to break down plastics. The bulk of the world’s medicines come from plants or living organisms and we really wanted to figure out how to feed, fuel and
