David Klenerman: The Chemist Who Never Had a Business Plan
"We didn't have a business plan," Sir David Klenerman has said of the company he and Shankar Balasubramanian founded. They had an idea on a piece of paper, and nine years later they had an instrument. That instrument changed medicine, and on 1 October 2026 it earned both men, together with the French scientist Pascal Mayer, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry.
A Family from South Africa
David Klenerman was born in September 1959, the son of two South African-born Jews, and has two children, Laura and Anna. He studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1982, and earned his doctorate in chemistry in 1986 at Churchill College under Ian W. M. Smith. A Fulbright scholarship took him to Stanford to work with the laser chemist Richard Zare. Then, unusually for a future Cambridge professor, he spent about seven years in industrial research at BP before returning to the Cambridge chemistry department in 1994, where he is a Fellow of Christ's College.
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His specialty was seeing the smallest things that exist. Klenerman builds microscopes and methods that watch individual molecules at work, which is exactly the skill that sequencing needed: not guessing at an average over trillions of strands, but photographing one strand and reading its color.
The Pub Table
On 26 August 1997 he and Balasubramanian met in the Panton Arms, a pub a short walk from the chemistry building, and drew the scheme that became Solexa sequencing: copy single DNA molecules while attaching glowing, reversible blocks, photograph, repeat. They co-founded Solexa in 1998. Nine years later Illumina acquired it, and the machines that came out of the idea have since read the DNA of millions of people. Klenerman's reaction to the news that someone had used the technology to sequence and treat a baby born with a rare disease: it really hit home.
He has said that neither of them could have succeeded alone. In 2024 the two were inducted into the United States National Inventors Hall of Fame.
The Honors
The Royal Society of Chemistry Interdisciplinary Award in 2007, a Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2012, a Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015, a Royal Medal in 2018, a knighthood in 2019, the Millennium Technology Prize in 2020, the Breakthrough Prize in 2022, the Gairdner Award and the Novo Nordisk Prize in 2024 and the Princess of Asturias Award in 2026 preceded the Wolf Prize. The Wolf citation reads: for developing methods with broad impact for large-scale, low-cost DNA sequencing, advancing genomic medicine.
Why David Klenerman Is Called a Genius
Klenerman is the rare scientist whose instruments outlive his papers. He asked a deceptively modest question: what if we stopped averaging and simply watched a single molecule? From that came a technology that cut the price of reading a human genome from about a billion dollars to under a thousand, and a drawing on a pub napkin that every hospital geneticist now depends on. A man with no business plan built one of the great scientific enterprises of his age.
Achievements
- Wolf Prize in Chemistry, 2026
- Co-founder of Solexa, 1998
- Millennium Technology Prize, 2020
- Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, 2022
- Inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame, 2024
- Knighted, 2019
