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Profile: Meet Exhibit I

Nature volume 451, pages 763–765 (2008)Cite this article

George Church has made a name for himself as an 'information exhibitionist'. Erika Check Hayden explores how the technological sage is turning his gaze to the next horizon - you.

One day in the 1980s, while a graduate student at Harvard University, George Church decided to change the way he saw the world. He started with simple tools — scissors, cardboard, and sticky tape — and he ended up working at his bench with a pair of homemade blinkers affixed to his temples. Asked about the nearly forgotten episode, an older, wiser, now-tenured Church chuckles at his younger self, but he still defends the stunt's essential point. “I was making a statement,” he says, taking a break from running one of the largest, most eclectic biology labs in the United States. “Sometimes scientists put on blinders and don't see the big picture.”

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  1. Erika Check Hayden
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See Editorial, page 745. . Erika Check Hayden writes for Nature from San Francisco.

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Hayden, E. Profile: Meet Exhibit I. Nature 451, 763–765 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/451763a

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