Dr. Gregory Stock
Gregory Stock, Ph.D., MBA is a biophysicist, best-selling author,
biotech entrepreneur, and the
director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA’s
School of Medicine. He has written extensively on the implications for
society, medicine and business of the human genome project and
associated developments in molecular genetics and bioinformatics. His
interests lie in the scientific and evolutionary as well as ethical,
social and political implications of today’s revolutions in the life
sciences and in information technology and computers.
Greg has dealt with
topics relating to privacy issues in healthcare and genomics; advances
in reproductive biology and embryo screening; future possibilities in
human germline engineering and anti-aging interventions; and scenarios
of future human evolution. His speeches, writings and positions
reflect a vision of pragmatism if not enthusiasm about adapting to the
profound and difficult shifts these new technologies will bring and
avoiding unnecessary delay in the development of new therapeutics and
medical and biological interventions emerging from progress in the life
sciences.
He also is the CEO of
Signum Biosciences, a biotech company
developing therapeutics for Alzheimer’s and other diseases as well as
health and wellness agents. He sits on the editorial board of the
American Journal of Bioethics and is in the department of
Pediatrics at
the UCLA School of Medicine. He is a member of the Board of Directors
of Napo Pharmaceuticals, a publicly traded pharmaceutical company
headquartered in San Francisco. He sits on the California Advisory
Committee on Stem Cells and Reproductive Cloning and serves as the
associate director for the Bioagenda Institute and the Center for Life
Science Studies at the University of California at
Berkeley.
Greg authored
Redesigning Humans: Choosing our genes, changing our
future,
Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global
Superorganism,
The Book of Questions: Love & Sex,
The Book of Questions: Business, Politics, and Ethics,
The Book of Questions, and
The Kids’ Book of Questions: Revised for the New Century,
and
coedited
Engineering the Human Germline: An Exploration of the Science and
Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to Our Children.
He was an early force in considering the implications of human germline
engineering and human enhancement. Through the Program on Medicine,
Technology and Society, which he founded at the UCLA School of
Medicine, he organized an influential 1998 conference at UCLA:
“Engineering the Human Germline”, which included a panel of James
Watson, French Anderson, Lee Hood and other major figures in the life
sciences. The event, which attracted considerable media attention and
opened up broad debate on what was then a largely taboo topic, was
covered on the front page of the New York Times.
Through
another
seminal UCLA conference, Milestones on Aging, Greg organized, he
helped legitimize research to significantly extend human longevity. The
event led to a follow conference he co-hosted at Berkeley with Bruce
Ames and Aubrey de Grey, who went on to found the Methuselah
Foundation, an organization that has aggressively promoted research on
life extension. The activity of the MTS Program was also critical in
establishing UCLA’s Center on Society and Genetics, which actively
explores broad policy issues in the genomics arena.
Greg earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1987, where he was a
Baker Scholar and won the Freund-Porter Entrepreneurship award. He
completed a doctorate in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University in
1977, where he earned a BS and MS in 1971.
Read his LinkedIn profile.