Our Mission
The World Genome
Every living thing carries a genome — a record of the molecular logic that lets it survive, adapt, and belong to its place. Together, these genomes form a vast, mostly-unread library of life on Earth. We call it the World Genome.
It's to biodiversity what the Human Genome Project was to ourselves: a civilization-scale effort to read and preserve the genetic record of the living world — not just the species we already know, but the unseen majority that hold most of biology's secrets. Environmental DNA (eDNA) — the genetic material that organisms shed into soil, water, and air — lets us read this record without ever having to see or disturb the things that live there.
A library that's burning
Biodiversity is being lost faster than science can describe it. Species disappear before they're catalogued; ecosystems shift before their inhabitants are sequenced. Every habitat we lose takes irreplaceable genomic information with it — molecular discoveries we'll never make, evolutionary stories we'll never read.
Reading and preserving this record while the organisms are still here is one of the defining scientific responsibilities of our time. It is not a project that finishes. It is a record we keep, the way human language keeps writing.
Why this matters twice over
The World Genome is a scientific record. It is also a way to teach a generation.
Educate
A generation fluent in biology
The students who learn to read DNA today are the scientists, founders, farmers, doctors, and citizens of the synthetic-biology and bio-economy era to come. Genomic literacy will be foundational to whole industries we're only beginning to imagine — from regenerative agriculture to bio-manufactured medicine to climate-adapted ecosystems.
Putting portable sequencing in students' hands now means a generation grows up with biology as a language they can read, not a discipline they receive.
Preserve
A record of the living world
Every sample a student processes adds to the genomic record of a real place at a real moment. Federated across schools, farms, and partners, these samples become a slowly-built atlas of what was alive, where, and when.
This is not a single lab's project; it cannot be. It is, by necessity, the work of many hands, in many places, contributing to a shared record.
Where we fit
World Genome Academy is the on-ramp. We don't claim to build the World Genome on our own — no single institution can, or should. What we do is put the tools, the curriculum, and the mentorship in students' hands, so that a generation joins this larger effort already fluent in its instruments and its ethics.
California is where we start: a biodiversity hotspot of nine Jepson ecoregions, beginning with our summer 2026 alpha cohort at Venice High School (LAUSD). From there, sample by sample, partner by partner — global in ambition, local in every cohort.
Read the living world
Every sample, every sequence, every student joins a record that no single institution could build alone. The World Genome is the why. World Genome Academy is the on-ramp.
See the curriculum