Famous Narcoleptics and Famous People with Narcolepsy

George McDonald Church (born August 28, 1954) is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, and chemist. He is Professor of Genetics[2] at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology[3] at Harvard and MIT, and founding core member[4] of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.[5][6][7] He is widely regarded as a pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology.[8] He is married[9] to fellow Harvard Medical School faculty in genetics, Ting Wu.[10] - Wikipedia

 

Church grew up dyslexic, developed narcolepsy in his teens and later survived a heart attack. Somehow he found the wherewithal to invent technologies that make it possible to sequence DNA. Being narcoleptic means that he falls asleep five times a day in meetings, even as he runs one of the largest labs at Harvard and serves on advisory boards for numerous companies. “There are a few genetic traits that make people feel sorry for you,” he says, “and there are some, like narcolepsy, at which people take personal offense unless you tell them in advance.” - Forbes

 

Honors

In 2011, Church was awarded the Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science of the Franklin Institute (awarded once every 7 years in Life Sciences).[60] Other honors include the American Society for Microbiology Promega Biotechnology Research Award in 2009, the Triennial International Steven Hoogendijk Award in 2010, the Scientific American Top 50 twice (for “Designing artificial life” in 2005 and "The $1000 genome" in 2006).[61][62] Newsweek picked Church for their 2008 “Power of Ideas” recognition in the category of Medicine (for the Personal Genome Project).[63] In September 2010, Dr Church was honored for his work in Genetics with the Mass High Tech All-Star Award.[64] He was elected to both the National Academy of Sciences (in 2011) [65] and the National Academy of Engineering (in 2012).[66] -Wikipedia