Pascal Mayer: The Frenchman Who Looked Crazy in 1997
"It seemed crazy, so I looked pretty crazy when I talked about it," Pascal Mayer told a reporter, recalling the day he proposed copying millions of fragments of DNA on a single surface and reading them all at once. The idea was so strange that few believed it. It became the foundation of modern genome sequencing, and on 1 October 2026 it earned him the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, shared with Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman.
A Mining Town in Lorraine
Pascal Mayer was born on 14 July 1963 in the Moselle region of eastern France and grew up in Stiring-Wendel, a mining town on the German border. He studied molecular biology at Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg, taking a master's degree in 1988 and a doctorate in macromolecular biophysics in 1991. Postdoctoral years followed at the University of Ottawa in Canada (1991 to 1994) and the Paul Pascal Research Center of France's national research agency, the CNRS (1994 to 1996).
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In November 1996 he joined the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline in Geneva. There, in April 1997, he filed two patents describing something no one had done: attach DNA fragments to a surface, make many copies in tight clusters, and read them all at the same time by fluorescence. He later described the method with an image: it is like putting all the pages of a book on a soccer field and being able to photograph the entire field at once.
The Cambridge team of Balasubramanian and Klenerman, through their company Solexa, took the approach forward, and Solexa acquired Mayer's patents. Illumina bought Solexa. A human genome that once took a decade and about a billion dollars is now sequenced overnight for roughly a thousand dollars, and about seventeen thousand sequencers are in use worldwide.
Afterwards
In 2014 he co-founded the company Alphanosos. The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences came in 2022, shared with the Cambridge pair, the Canada Gairdner International Award in 2024 and the Princess of Asturias Award in 2026. The Wolf citation: for developing methods with broad impact for large-scale, low-cost DNA sequencing, advancing genomic medicine.
Why Pascal Mayer Is Called a Genius
Genius is often being right early. Mayer was right in 1997, in an industrial laboratory, with an idea that sounded impossible and a patent that few understood. It took a pub-garden sketch in Cambridge and a decade of engineering to prove it, but the central notion, many copies in tight clusters and one photograph for millions of readings, is still inside every machine that sequences DNA today.
Achievements
- Wolf Prize in Chemistry, 2026
- Filed the 1997 patents for cluster-based massively parallel sequencing
- Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, 2022
- Canada Gairdner International Award, 2024
- Co-founder of Alphanosos, 2014
