Shankar Balasubramanian: The Idea Sketched in a Cambridge Pub Garden
On 26 August 1997 a chemist in Cambridge wrote a line in his diary that evening: "The Solexa Idea!" Earlier that day he and a colleague had been sitting in the beer garden of the Panton Arms pub, near the university's chemistry building, sketching a way to read DNA. Twenty-nine years later, on 1 October 2026, Sir Shankar Balasubramanian received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry for it.
Born in Madras, Raised in England
Shankar Balasubramanian was born on 30 September 1966 in Madras, now Chennai, and moved to the United Kingdom with his parents in 1967. He read natural sciences at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, from 1985 to 1988, and stayed for his doctorate under Chris Abell, working on an enzyme called chorismate synthase. A postdoctoral fellowship at Pennsylvania State University with Stephen Benkovic followed. In 1994 he returned to Cambridge to start his own group, and rose from lecturer in 1998 to the Herchel Smith Chair of Medicinal Chemistry in 2008. He is a Fellow of Trinity College and a senior group leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute.
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The scheme he and David Klenerman drew that August afternoon was to copy single DNA molecules with a polymerase, adding fluorescently labelled building blocks one at a time, each carrying a temporary block so only one letter could be added per cycle. A camera would photograph the color after each step and the sequence would read itself out, letter by letter, across millions of fragments at once.
In November 1997 they pitched the idea to the venture capital firm Abingworth. Solexa was founded in 1998 and lived inside the chemistry department until 2001. In 2004 it acquired the DNA cluster technology of the Swiss company Manteia, and with it patents by Pascal Mayer. In 2006 the Genome Analyzer shipped, reading about a billion letters per run. In 2007 Illumina bought Solexa for roughly six hundred million dollars; sources differ on the exact figure. Sequencing a human genome, which cost more than a billion dollars in the Human Genome Project, now costs less than one thousand dollars and takes less than a day.
Looking back, he has said the impact went way beyond his imagination and is still in its infancy.
Prizes
He was awarded the Corday-Morgan Medal in 2002, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012, was knighted in 2017, received the Royal Medal in 2018, the Millennium Technology Prize in 2020, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2022 and the Gairdner Award and Novo Nordisk Prize in 2024. He joined the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2023 and received the Khorana Prize in 2025 and the Princess of Asturias Award in 2026.
Why Shankar Balasubramanian Is Called a Genius
He is a chemist who looks at a molecule that has defeated others, such as the knotted four-stranded DNA called G-quadruplex, and asks what it is doing in the cell. But the reason the world knows his name is simpler. He and a friend took an afternoon at a pub table and reduced reading the code of life to something so cheap and quick that it is now used to diagnose children with rare diseases. Few ideas ever move so quickly from a napkin to a hospital.
Achievements
- Wolf Prize in Chemistry, 2026
- Co-inventor of Solexa next-generation DNA sequencing, 1997
- Millennium Technology Prize, 2020
- Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, 2022
- Knighted, 2017
- Fellow of the Royal Society, 2012
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