Prof. Brown received each of his degrees from The University of Chicago,
including his B.S.in 1976, his Ph.D in 1980, and his M.D. in 1982.
After getting his medical degree in 1982, Brown completed a 3-year
pediatric residency at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago but decided
he could have a greater impact through basic research. In 1985, Brown
took a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San
Francisco with J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus (who shared the 1989
Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discoveries about how genes can ignite
cancerous tumors). In 1988, Brown became an investigator of the Howard
Hughes Medical Institute and an assistant professor in the department of
biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine.
In 2001, Prof. Brown, Michael Eisen and Harold Varmus co-founded the
Public Library of Science (PLOS) to make published scientific research
open access and freely available to researchers in the scientific community.
Impossible Foods
In 2009, Prof. Brown took an 18-month sabbatical where he decided that
the world's largest environmental problem, and the problem where he could
have the most impact, was the use of animals to produce food.
By the end of his sabbatical, Prof. Brown began to recruit a small team of
scientists to determine precisely why meat smells, handles, cooks and
tastes like what we are familiar with as meat. This led to the founding of
Impossible Foods in July 2011.