Following his PhD in bioelectronic technology Gordon worked at Oxford University spin-out company, MediSense, developing electrochemical glucose monitoring systems.
Many years later, Gordon joined scientists Spike Willcocks and Professor Hagan Bayley, to convince Oxford University to launch Oxford Nanopore in 2005, aiming to develop a new generation of sensing technology that can read codes of DNA in real time.
COVID-19 put Nanopore on the map, with a Government testing contract and deployment of its virus tracking devices in 85 countries. However, Nanopore's technology is used to answer all kinds of biological questions, from detecting cancer, to helping authorities crack down on food safety and even for DNA sequencing in space.
Highlights
I’m old enough to remember the first moon landing, I was a young kid sitting there with my dad watching it on a black and white tv.
For all you youngsters out there, really struggling to think about what your career is going to be and where you want to go, just follow your instinct.
There was always business conversations but I couldn’t think of anything worse than working with my dad.
I did interview for some academic positions and I slowly realised it wasn’t my calling.
I wanted to make a difference in the world, an impactful difference, it seemed to be something very important to me.
We transformed the lives of diabetics and it was such an amazing journey.
Over a pie and a pint, they gave me half a million pounds and I needed that to leave my job.
The pandemic has made everybody understand why and how a virus can spread and mutate.
We have been at the forefront of sequencing the mutations from Delta to Omicron but prior to that we were also helping out with Ebola in Africa and Zika in Brazil.
We are rapidly heading into the genomic era… this is just the first of many, many breakthroughs in medicine that will happen and it’s just so humbling.