ASTROSUMMIT-2026

Prof. Doron Lancet has a B.Sc. degree in chemistry and physics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, PhD in Chemical Immunology from Weizmann Institute of Science and postdoctoral training at Harvard and Yale. He established and headed the Crown Human Genome Center at the Weizmann Institute for 20 years until 2015. Lancet pioneered research on the biochemistry, genetics and evolution of olfaction, including computer models for analyzing affinity distributions in molecular receptor repertoires. He has run a program on deciphering human disease genes using next-generation DNA sequencing. Prof. Lancet and team developed GeneCards, a world-renown web-based compendium of human genes, with affiliated software tools for the phenotype interpretation of genome sequences. In the last 30 years Lancet has in parallel established a novel computer-based kinetic model for prebiotic evolution, with molecular lipid assemblies that store and transfer compositional information, leading to reproduction, selection and evolution. This unorthodox view, based on recent information on meteorite organic molecules, constitutes an alternative to the more popular RNA-first scenario for life’s origin. Lancet was awarded the Takasago and Wright Awards in the USA and the Hestrin and the Landau Prizes in Israel. He is member of the European Molecular Biology organization and was awarded the International Society for Computational Biology, and awarded a significant impact Fellow of the International Society of Computational Biology. Lancet was in the World Human Genome Organization Council until 2012. Prof. Lancet is active in public lecturing and writing in Israel and abroad, and wrote a science column for the Israeli major daily Haaretz.