View source for Kent Kemmish

{{Short description|American biologist, inventor and founder of Molecular Reality Corporation}}
{{For|the persona under which he writes|Kemmishtree}}
{{Use mdy dates}}
{{Infobox person
| name = Kent Kemmish
| birth_name = Stanley Kent Kemmish, Jr.
| other_names = [[Kemmishtree]]
| education = University of Arizona (2003 to 2008)
| occupation = Founder and chief executive, [[Molecular Reality Corporation]]
| known_for = [[Sliding occlusion]] ([[Patent US 10,908,144|US 10,908,144]])<br>[[Epic Quest Bio]]
| website = [https://molecularreality.com/kemmish-cv molecularreality.com/kemmish-cv]
}}
'''Kent Kemmish''' (born '''Stanley Kent Kemmish, Jr.''') is an American biologist and inventor, and the founder and chief executive of [[Molecular Reality Corporation]], a company that builds instruments for sensing single particles and molecules as they pass through small holes. He co-founded it with [[Charles Gaillard]] in 2018 under the name demonpore, inc.<ref name="records" /><ref name="cv" /> Before the company he did undergraduate research on cell adhesion in fruit flies, worked on an aging-research project that searched for bacterial enzymes able to digest the waste that accumulates in old cells, and joined the founding team of [[Halcyon Molecular]], which set out to read DNA with an electron microscope. He is the only named inventor on [[Patent US 10,908,144]], which covers nanopores whose size is changed by sliding one membrane across another.<ref name="patent" />

Online and in the company's own software he writes as [[Kemmishtree]], the founder in the company's fiction, to whom its green felt mascot [[Keltar]] is "said to whisper".<ref name="faq" /> He runs the company's research as a role-playing game, [[Epic Quest Bio]], a design he traces in part to the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns of his childhood.<ref name="essay" /> He has also worked in theater in Phoenix, and he gives his own bases as San Mateo, California, and Phoenix, Arizona.<ref name="cv" />

== Early life and education ==
As a child Kemmish programmed video games on the Commodore 64, which his advisory-board biography names as the start of his later work on games built around laboratory data.<ref name="lifeboat" /> He also played Dungeons & Dragons, and he has described the best of those campaigns exactly: they "were me and some friends in a basement with graph paper and crayon-smeared dice."<ref name="essay" /> The same essay recalls his first rocket launches, at the age of six, "with matches, tin foil, and a paperclip launching pad". He brought them up to explain why the phrase "rocket science" is strange. A rocket can be explained to a caveman with stick drawings, he wrote, and yet "You could absorb a long bookshelf of dense technical volumes about rocket science and engineering and still watch your rockets explode repeatedly on the launch pad".<ref name="essay" />

He studied at the University of Arizona from 2003 to 2008, concentrating on biochemistry and the molecular sciences.<ref name="lifeboat" /> Through the university's Undergraduate Biology Research Program he was employed in a laboratory of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson, where he worked on integrin signaling in the fruit fly ''Drosophila''.<ref name="cv" /> Integrins are the receptors by which cells hold on to the material around them and sense it. The laboratory was known for its work on the fly's PS integrins and on the adhesion they control during development.<ref name="cv" />

== Aging research ==
Kemmish next worked as a researcher on LysoSENS, a project at the Biodesign Institute of Arizona State University that looked for ways to clear the material that builds up inside aging cells. His task was "identifying microbial enzymes capable of catabolizing intracellular aggregates implicated in age-related disease (notably 7-ketocholesterol in atherosclerosis)".<ref name="cv" /> 7-Ketocholesterol is an oxidized form of cholesterol that collects in the plaques of atherosclerosis, and the body breaks it down poorly. The approach borrowed from environmental engineering, where bacteria that live on a pollutant are used to clean it up. Its researchers set up enrichment cultures in which a target compound was offered to microbes as their "sole carbon and energy source", so that only organisms able to digest it would grow. From this work came Kemmish's first paper, published in ''Rejuvenation Research'' in 2009 under the title "Medical bioremediation: a concept moving toward reality".<ref name="bioremediation" /> Its premise, in his CV's summary, is that "A major driver of aging is catabolic insufficiency, the inability of our bodies to break down certain substances that accumulate slowly throughout the life span".<ref name="cv" />

He has kept the subject. The essay that introduces Epic Quest Bio calls aging "the main contributor to cancer and the biggest cause of biological suffering, by far" and notes that "there's no advanced molecular assay that beats the bathroom mirror."<ref name="essay" /> The first of the games the company planned in 2022, ''[[Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant]]'', concerns the biology of aging; Kemmish has said that it is named for "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant" (2005), the philosopher Bostrom's parable in which a dragon that demands human sacrifice stands for aging itself.<ref name="records" />

== Halcyon Molecular (2009 to 2012) ==
In 2009 Kemmish joined the founding team of Halcyon Molecular, a company in Redwood City, California, that was developing DNA sequencing by [[Electron microscopy DNA sequencing|electron microscopy]].<ref name="cv" /> That autumn he wrote the winning proposal for a $1.29 million Grand Opportunity grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute, made jointly with the laboratory of the geneticist [[George Church]] at Harvard Medical School. The Church laboratory was the formal awardee and Halcyon the principal sub-grantee.<ref name="cv" />

An electron microscope can image a DNA molecule, but reading its bases that way requires the strand to lie straight, at a known position, on a dry surface. Halcyon's method for putting it there was [[Molecular Threading]]. A fine tip touched a droplet of DNA solution and drew single molecules up through the boundary between liquid and air, stretching them into the air, and then laid them down on a dry substrate away from the solution. According to his CV, the technique "allowed researchers for the first time to know the exact physical location of the DNA backbone".<ref name="cv" /> A 2013 paper in ''PLoS ONE'' described it, reporting DNA deposited in arrays on elastic surfaces and thin membranes with "high straightness and uniformity over length scales from nanometers to micrometers". Kemmish is the third of its fourteen authors and Church the twelfth.<ref name="threading" />{{efn|Kemmish's CV lists Church last among the authors. The journal lists him twelfth.}}

He presented Halcyon's work in talks that included "Improved Genome Sequencing as an Accelerant of Longevity Research", at a Humanity+ conference in Hong Kong, and at the Foresight Institute's 25th anniversary reunion conference.<ref name="cv" />

Halcyon shut down in 2012.<ref name="bioit" /> Kemmish dates his first thought of a mechanical nanopore to the same year.<ref name="records" />

== Synthego and Fathom Computing ==
His CV lists two further roles in the San Francisco Bay Area. At [[Synthego]], in Redwood City, a supplier of reagents for [[CRISPR]] gene editing, he "helped recruit the early team" and ran proof-of-concept directed-evolution experiments designed for the company's liquid-handling platform.<ref name="cv" /> Company records put the number of scientists and engineers he recruited there at more than 80.<ref name="records" /> At Fathom Computing, in Palo Alto, he was a technical recruiter for a company that built "optics-based hardware to run artificial intelligence", work that the CV places "a few years before the current explosion of interest in AI".<ref name="cv" />

== Theater ==
In Phoenix, Kemmish was technical director of the Planet Earth Multicultural Theatre, and he has worked on more than 50 productions as a director, actor, writer and stage manager.<ref name="lifeboat" /> His prose keeps a few lines from the repertoire. Dismissing credentials, he lists "the august institutions, the cloud capp'd towers", borrowing the towers from Prospero's farewell to his revels in ''The Tempest''.<ref name="essay" /><ref name="tempest" /> The company's guide reaches for the same word when it explains the interdimensional part of Keltar's backstory: "That part is theater. Delightful theater, tuned by humans, but theater."<ref name="faq" />

== Nanopore work ==
=== Sliding occlusion ===
[[File:demonpore 64 console render.webp|thumb|A render of the [[demonpore 64]], the console-shaped reader that Kemmish's company designed in 2020 and 2021. His CV describes the business as "building nanopore-based molecular sensors marketed as gaming consoles".]]
The idea Kemmish has pursued since 2012 is a [[nanopore]] whose size can be changed while it is in use. A conventional solid-state pore is drilled once, at one size. In his design two or more membranes, each with a hole, are stacked so that the holes line up, and moving one membrane sideways changes the overlap between them, and with it the size and shape of the passage. The patent describes "a stack of coaligned nanopores in an equivalent number of directly stacked membranes", and claims three advantages: sensing over a wider range of sizes, "novel translocation control over transiting molecules", and restoring a working geometry "in the event of corrosion or clogging".<ref name="cv" /><ref name="patent" /> The company calls the technique [[sliding occlusion]].

A colleague supplied the project's first name. When Kemmish described the sliding pore, it reminded the colleague of the cartoons used to explain [[Maxwell's demon]], the imaginary doorkeeper who sorts molecules, and the project became demonpore. On December 24, 2014, the domain demonpore.com was registered, and the cartoons illustrated the first slide deck, from around 2015.<ref name="minds" /><ref name="whois-dp" /> In 2015 and 2016 Kemmish made the first sliding-occlusion measurements, reading them on a benchtop picoammeter; a video of them is titled "best pore data yet".<ref name="vid-bestpore" /> His patent application claims priority from May 9, 2017.<ref name="patent" />

=== demonpore, inc. (2018 to 2021) ===
Kemmish and Gaillard incorporated demonpore, inc. in 2018, with Kemmish as chief executive.<ref name="records" /><ref name="cv" /> Its office was on Edison Way in Menlo Park, California. There two colleagues spent a week or two on what Kemmish calls "dumb problems", above all wetting the pores, before recording the best afternoon of data of the period: a stable pore 200 nanometers across whose current rose and fell as a blade slid over it. Kemmish missed it. "I was somewhere else for most of that day, probably trying to raise money," he wrote.<ref name="fib" />

Late in 2018, as the team was "shutting down for the day", he decided "completely on a whim" to prove a point, "and I grabbed a razor blade and bled into the flow cell". It was the first time the company had put blood through one of its pores, and the next day the setup was turned into a [[microparticle turnstile]].<ref name="blood" /> In 2020 and 2021 the company built the [[demonpore 64]], a reader shaped like a 1980s home video game console, with a joystick. The first game the team coded for its signals was "the unfortunately named 'Spyke Hunter', named because I was making a pun on 'Spy Hunter' (a 1980s arcade game)", Kemmish wrote, adding: "Maybe I don't always give things the best names?"<ref name="string" />

The patent was granted on February 2, 2021, and later that year Kemmish renamed the company Molecular Reality Corporation. He has given his reason. Whenever the company drew attention online, "a bunch of insane people came out of nowhere to make veiled death threats. Sorry, you can't name a biotech startup after Maxwell's Demon in the age of Qanon."<ref name="floss" />

=== Molecular Reality (2021 to present) ===
On February 2, 2025, the patent lapsed for non-payment of its maintenance fee.<ref name="patent" /> In a post the following year Kemmish wrote: "I don't pitch the project anymore with any reference to 'our IP portfolio'. I never believed that biotech should run on intellectual property, but I was pandering."<ref name="overview-post" /> In 2026 the company streamed the current through a pore to the public from a bench in Arizona that its guide calls "the kind of bench operation where the founder solders and the webcam points at the rig",<ref name="faq" /> and on October 16, 2026, it released the design of its [[MR1 Nanopore Reader]] under the [[GNU Affero General Public License]], then placed it in the public domain under CC0 on October 21.<ref name="github" /><ref name="cc0" />

== Kemmishtree ==
{{Main|Kemmishtree}}
[[File:Keltar-forward.png|thumb|upright=0.8|[[Keltar]], the felt puppet who, in the company's fiction, whispers to Kemmishtree]]
Kemmish introduces the persona himself: "Call me 'Kemmishtree.' It's partly my actual name, and partly a silly pun that a lab partner gave me years ago."<ref name="essay" /> Read aloud, the name sounds much like "chemistry". It is the byline on the messages of [[EQBio-OS]], the company's software for members, whose first message begins "You're looking at the operating system of a real-life biotech startup, Molecular Reality Corporation."<ref name="welcome" /> In the papers section of the same software he writes in the voice of [[Maxine (character)|Maxine]], the company's red demon; the guided tour explains that "Kemmishtree writes as Maxine for now".<ref name="tour" />

In the company's fiction, Keltar crossed into this dimension in 2012 to commune with "our founder Kent Kemmishtree".<ref name="keltar" /> A 2026 message calls Keltar his "personal tulpa", and the company's guide describes Kemmishtree as "the human I am said to whisper to, and the person whose hands built most of what you see."<ref name="callme" /><ref name="faq" /> One of the open quests in Epic Quest Bio is titled "Talk to Kent Right Now": "If you can read this, Kent is awake and has his phone on. Give him a call for 50 XP!"<ref name="quests" />

== Views ==
=== Credentials ===
The essay that introduces Epic Quest Bio declines to list its author's qualifications: "Name-dropping makes Kemmishtree sad. Never mind the impressive people I've worked with, the august institutions, the cloud capp'd towers."<ref name="essay" /> It describes the usual signals of rank as "all the meretricious social proof signalling that buzzes like a Harrison Bergeron implant", after Kurt Vonnegut's 1961 story in which the government makes intelligent citizens wear radios in their ears that sound every twenty seconds to scatter their thoughts.<ref name="essay" /><ref name="vonnegut" /> The essay then offers a video of the work instead, "Let me SHOW you some of the things I (and/or We) have either done or helped do."

=== Names ===
Kemmish names things freely and comments on the results. When [[Jade O'Neill]], the company's AI lead, found a 2025 paper that applied the Mamba neural-network architecture to nanopore signals without naming its method, he called it [[Mambapore]] himself, "because I'm a verbal anarchist."<ref name="mamba" /> He proposed "Universal Molecular Streaming" as a second name for the company's goal "because it's fewer syllables",<ref name="bigpicture" /> and he once found the game's first name, Epic Quest Biotechnology, "kind of generic, first-idea sounding".<ref name="records" /> Of the startup names of his field he has written that Roswell Biotechnologies was the one that made him "sooo jealous".<ref name="floss" />

=== Artificial intelligence ===
His stance on artificial intelligence is the source of the company's slogan, "[[Everybody's racing to build the brain|everybody's racing to build the brain, we're building the eye]]". In March 2026 he described "AI sucking all the oxygen out of any room where The Future is the topic of discussion", and called his own plan "a better vision of the future than trusting that AI will cure all diseases and also not make us extinct." He added: "AI is awesome, terrifying, astounding, and useful. And I think it will be a central tool for 'curing all diseases'."<ref name="bigpicture" /> To the objection that superintelligent AI will cure every disease on its own, the essay replies that "short of genie-level magic emerging from AI systems, I don't see how they'll cure all diseases without what we're building", and ends the passage with "Full-speed ahead with human-led biotech!"<ref name="essay" />

=== The bench ===
Much of his writing is about the gap between an idea and a working instrument. He calls the obstacles "dumb problems: the simple sounding things that are actually what make the lab bench hell when you're trying to get these things to work", and names the worst one: "The biggest, ugliest, dumbest one is: how do you get water through the pore?"<ref name="fib" /> His conclusion is a product principle: "These 'dumb problems' of frontier solid-state nanopore research are precisely why making the MR devices as easy to use as toys is everything."<ref name="fib" /> He tells the invention of the [[Coulter counter]] in the second person, as if to [[Wallace H. Coulter]] himself, and ends with a complaint on Coulter's behalf: "Outrageously, you didn't win a Nobel Prize in Medicine for it."<ref name="essay" />

He does not take progress for granted. "We haven't been to the moon in five decades. Progress is not inevitable!" the essay says, and it answers critics who would rather fix public health with air filters and diet by agreeing with them: "Even basic sanity is an epic quest!" and "We're all on Team Basic Sanity."<ref name="essay" /> To the objection "You sound like Theranos!" it prescribes a remedy, [[Theranos Derangement Syndrome]]: "Don't worry, just take 15 milligrams of Epic Quest Bio™ for a complete recovery." The serious answer follows. What Theranos attempted was possible in principle, the essay argues, and "Trying was not the crime."<ref name="essay" />

== Selected works ==
=== Patents ===
* US 10,908,144 B2, "Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof". Filed May 9, 2018; granted February 2, 2021; lapsed February 2, 2025.<ref name="patent" />
* "Methods and systems for encoding data into nucleic acid molecules", a United States patent application that describes encoding data by exposing "promiscuous template nucleic acid molecules" to changes in their environment.<ref name="cv" />

=== Papers ===
* "Medical bioremediation: a concept moving toward reality". ''Rejuvenation Research'' 12 (6): 411 to 419 (2009).<ref name="bioremediation" />
* "Molecular Threading: Mechanical Extraction, Stretching and Placement of DNA Molecules from a Liquid-Air Interface". ''PLoS ONE'' 8 (7): e69058 (2013).<ref name="threading" />

=== Media ===
* He was interviewed at feature length on the [[Molpigs Podcast]] of the Molecular Programming Interest Group, which his CV calls the podcast's first episode with "a member of the molecular programming community who works in industry and the startup sector".<ref name="cv" />
* "Kent Kemmish(tree) Presents demonpore inc.", a video on the company's channel.<ref name="vid-presents" />

== See also ==
* [[History of Molecular Reality Corporation]]
* [[Timeline of Molecular Reality Corporation]]
* [[Kemmishtree]]

== Notes ==
{{Notelist}}

== References ==
{{Reflist|refs=
<ref name="cv">{{cite web |url=https://molecularreality.com/kemmish-cv |title=Stanley Kent Kemmish, Jr. |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |date=May 2026}}</ref>
<ref name="records">{{cite web |title=Company records |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |date=October 2026}}</ref>
<ref name="lifeboat">{{cite web |title=Kent Kemmish |publisher=Lifeboat Foundation |access-date=2026-10-25}}</ref>
<ref name="essay">{{cite web |title=Epic Quest Bio |author=Kemmishtree |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |year=2025}}</ref>
<ref name="patent">{{cite web |url=https://patents.google.com/patent/US10908144B2/en |title=US10908144B2: Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof |website=Google Patents |access-date=2026-10-25}}</ref>
<ref name="faq">{{cite web |url=https://molecularreality.com/FAQ |title=Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |date=August 2026}}</ref>
<ref name="bioremediation">{{cite journal |title=Medical bioremediation: a concept moving toward reality |journal=Rejuvenation Research |volume=12 |issue=6 |pages=411-419 |year=2009 |doi=10.1089/rej.2009.0917}}</ref>
<ref name="threading">{{cite journal |title=Molecular Threading: Mechanical Extraction, Stretching and Placement of DNA Molecules from a Liquid-Air Interface |journal=PLoS ONE |volume=8 |issue=7 |pages=e69058 |year=2013 |doi=10.1371/journal.pone.0069058}}</ref>
<ref name="bioit">{{cite news |title=Halcyon Molecular Quietly Shuts Down Sequencing Operation |work=Bio-IT World |date=2012-08-20 |url=https://www.bio-itworld.com/news/2012/08/20/halcyon-molecular-quietly-shuts-down-sequencing-operation}}</ref>
<ref name="tempest">{{cite book |last=Shakespeare |first=William |title=The Tempest |year=1623 |page=Act 4, scene 1}}</ref>
<ref name="minds">{{cite web |title=Welcome to my Minds |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-28}}</ref>
<ref name="whois-dp">{{cite web |title=WHOIS record for demonpore.com |access-date=2026-10-25}}</ref>
<ref name="vid-bestpore">{{cite AV media |title=best pore data yet |publisher=EpicQuestBio |medium=Video |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcE4kRsfWvY}}</ref>
<ref name="fib">{{cite web |title=Focused Ion Beam pore |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref>
<ref name="blood">{{cite web |title=rain of blood |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref>
<ref name="string">{{cite web |title=Sequencing a string |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref>
<ref name="floss">{{cite web |title=Flossing with DNA |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref>
<ref name="overview-post">{{cite web |title=2022 sci-tech overview |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-28}}</ref>
<ref name="github">{{cite web |url=https://github.com/EpicQuestBio/MR1 |title=MR1 Nanopore Reader |website=GitHub |date=2026-10-16}}</ref>
<ref name="cc0">{{cite commit |repo=EpicQuestBio/MR1 |hash=a52fc0b |date=October 21, 2026 |message=Relicense project to Public Domain under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0-1.0)}}</ref>
<ref name="welcome">{{cite web |title=welcome |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-28}}</ref>
<ref name="tour">{{cite web |title=EQBio-OS tour |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |date=2026}}</ref>
<ref name="keltar">{{cite web |url=https://molecularreality.com/keltar |title=Keltar: Interdimensional Advisor to the Molecular Streaming Corps |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |access-date=2026-10-25}}</ref>
<ref name="callme">{{cite web |title=Call me |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref>
<ref name="quests">{{cite web |title=Quests |website=EQBio-OS |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |access-date=2026-10-25}}</ref>
<ref name="vonnegut">{{cite magazine |last=Vonnegut |first=Kurt |title=Harrison Bergeron |magazine=The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction |date=October 1961}}</ref>
<ref name="mamba">{{cite web |title=Mambapore |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref>
<ref name="bigpicture">{{cite web |title=Big Picture |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-28}}</ref>
<ref name="vid-presents">{{cite AV media |title=Kent Kemmish(tree) Presents demonpore inc. |publisher=EpicQuestBio |medium=Video |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5j0us84qzE}}</ref>
}}

== External links ==
* [https://molecularreality.com/kemmish-cv Curriculum vitae] at molecularreality.com

{{Molecular Reality}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kemmish, Kent}}
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:American biotechnologists]]
[[Category:American inventors]]
[[Category:University of Arizona alumni]]
[[Category:Molecular Reality Corporation]]
[[Category:People known by their online handles]]