When David Bentley was in his early teens, he was already nurturing his fascination with molecular biology. It was not yet being taught in schools, so he learned about life at the molecular level at home with his mother, a biology teacher who shared his interest. Together, they were often up late at night reading, among other things, the early monographs on the structure of DNA. (See CV)

This childhood excitement — and later, encounters with pioneering geneticists such as John Sulston — were the starting points for a career spent at the forefront of major advances in human genetics. With a PhD in molecular biology, Bentley was a postdoctoral fellow at Guy's and St Thomas's Hospital in London, studying the mutations that cause genetic diseases such as haemophilia. Drawn into the small but growing community of geneticists, he began meeting Sulston, who became an important mentor. It was he who invited Bentley to be a founding member of the Sanger Centre (now the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute) near Cambridge, UK, one of the world's top genome centres and a major player in the Human Genome Project.

While at the Sanger, Bentley met two lecturers in the chemistry department of the University of Cambridge as they were founding their company, Solexa. He was captivated by their vision for a new kind of DNA technology: anchoring millions of single DNA molecules on a chip for simple, fast, cheap DNA sequencing and analysis. “It swept away so many problems that we had to deal with every day in the lab,” says Bentley. He joined the new company's advisory board.

About four years ago, Bentley was tempted to join the company full-time, but decided to stay at the Sanger because he was starting new genetics projects there. He continued to be an adviser to Solexa as it moved towards its goal of building an instrument that can sequence an entire human genome at a fraction of today's costs. Over the past year and a half, it became clear that the technology was beginning to work, says Bentley, and he wanted to devote more time to applying it to human genetics.

Bentley is now moving to Solexa as chief scientist, which in many ways is sending him back to his early days in molecular biology. “It's refreshing to return to my roots,” says Bentley. He doesn't see this as abandoning academia in favour of industry. “I see a coming together of academia and industry, not a split,” says Bentley. “It's possible to bring an academic ethos to a commercial setting and to bring a commercial ethos to an academic setting.”