Dr. Pat Brown

Impossible Foods, Inc.

Patrick O. Brown, MD, PhD is an emeritus professor at Stanford University and founder of Impossible Foods, a company whose mission is to replace the use of animals in the global food system. Dr. Brown founded Impossible Foods in 2011, when he recognized that the only way to avert catastrophic climate change and the global collapse of biodiversity was to replace the most destructive technology in human history – animal agriculture. He saw that this goal could be achieved by inventing a new technology platform that would enable the most delicious, nutritious, affordable and sustainable meats in the world to be made directly from plants. Dr. Brown received his BA, MD and PhD at the University of Chicago and completed a residency in pediatrics at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital. As a post-doctoral fellow with Mike Bishop and Harold Varmus, he defined the mechanism by which HIV and other retroviruses incorporate their genes into the genomes of the cells they infect. He then joined the Biochemistry faculty at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. At Stanford, Pat and colleagues invented the DNA microarray – a new technology that made it possible to monitor the activity of all the genes in a genome – along with the first methods for analyzing, visualizing and interpreting global gene expression programs. This technology opened a window on the genetic programs that specify the characteristics and behaviors of cells and tissues. He and his colleagues then pioneered the use of gene expression patterns to classify cancers and improve prediction of their clinical course. Pat has also been a pioneer in open-access publishing. With Harold Varmus and Michael Eisen, he founded the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit scientific publisher that has transformed the publishing industry by making scientific and medical research results freely available to the public. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine. and recipient of the National Academy of Sciences award in Molecular Biology, American Cancer Society Medal of Honor and the Takeda Award. He has published more than 240 scientific articles.