Patrick O. Brown: Founder of Impossible Foods and Inventor of the DNA Microarray
Business Owner · Food & Beverage
Stanford biochemist Patrick O. Brown invented the DNA microarray, co-founded the Public Library of Science and founded Impossible Foods.
About Patrick O. Brown: Founder of Impossible Foods and Inventor of the DNA Microarray
Patrick O'Reilly Brown (born 1954) is an American geneticist and businessman, the founder of Impossible Foods Inc. and professor emeritus in Stanford University's department of biochemistry. He is a co-founder of the Public Library of Science, the inventor of the DNA microarray and a former investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Brown received all of his degrees from the University of Chicago, including a BS in 1976 and an MD in 1982; his PhD, granted in 1980 under Nicholas R. Cozzarelli, involved the study of DNA topoisomerases. After his medical degree he completed a three-year pediatric residency at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago but decided he could have greater impact through basic research. In 1985 he took a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF with J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus, who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discoveries about how genes can ignite cancerous tumors, where Brown and colleagues defined the mechanism by which retroviruses such as HIV integrate their genes into the genome. Sources: English Wikipedia (Patrick O. Brown, accessed September 2026).
Basic Information
Founder, Impossible Foods; professor emeritus of biochemistry, Stanford University
Company Details
Impossible Foods Inc.
Plant-based Foods, Biotechnology