Conrad Lichtenstein is co-founder of Nemesis Bioscience, where he is chief scientific officer. Nemesis is a biotech company developing novel biological therapeutics to inactivate antibiotic resistance by CRISPR/Cas mediated gene inactivation, to resurrect the use of well-established generic antibiotics and to limit the emergence and spread of resistance to new antibiotics.

Previously, he was chief scientific officer at Population Genetics Technologies, developing DNA bar-coding to study the genetics of disease predisposition and drug response in large populations. He is also co-founder of the consultancy Ilovani.

Following a PhD in molecular biology at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, he held a postdoctoral position at the University of Washington in Seattle. He then took a faculty position at Imperial College London, followed by an appointment as Professor of Molecular Biology at Queen Mary University of London.

His academic research has covered mobile DNA elements spreading antibiotic resistance in bacteria, gene targeting, and engineering virus resistance in transgenic plants. In the course of working on the latter, he discovered that similar genes had jumped into plants 25 million years earlier. This showed that genetic modification can occur in nature, and led to his involvement in the GM debate.