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Kent Kemmish

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American biologist, inventor and founder of Molecular Reality Corporation
For the persona under which he writes, see Kemmishtree.
Kent Kemmish
Born
Stanley Kent Kemmish, Jr.
Other namesKemmishtree
EducationUniversity of Arizona (2003 to 2008)
OccupationFounder and chief executive, Molecular Reality Corporation
Known forSliding occlusion (US 10,908,144)
Epic Quest Bio
Websitemolecularreality.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.[1][2] 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.[3]

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".[4] 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.[5] He has also worked in theater in Phoenix, and he gives his own bases as San Mateo, California, and Phoenix, Arizona.[2]

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.[6] 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."[5] 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".[5]

He studied at the University of Arizona from 2003 to 2008, concentrating on biochemistry and the molecular sciences.[6] 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.[2] 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.[2]

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)".[2] 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".[7] 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".[2]

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."[5] 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.[1]

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.[2] 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.[2]

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".[2] 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.[8][a]

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.[2]

Halcyon shut down in 2012.[9] Kemmish dates his first thought of a mechanical nanopore to the same year.[1]

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.[2] Company records put the number of scientists and engineers he recruited there at more than 80.[1] 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".[2]

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.[6] 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.[5][10] 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."[4]

Nanopore work

Sliding occlusion

A rendered console with horns, a rack of coloured reagent bottles, a joystick and a poster on the wall
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".[2][3] 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.[11][12] 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".[13] His patent application claims priority from May 9, 2017.[3]

demonpore, inc. (2018 to 2021)

Kemmish and Gaillard incorporated demonpore, inc. in 2018, with Kemmish as chief executive.[1][2] 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.[14]

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.[15] 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?"[16]

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."[17]

Molecular Reality (2021 to present)

On February 2, 2025, the patent lapsed for non-payment of its maintenance fee.[3] 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."[18] 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",[4] 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.[19][20]

Kemmishtree

Main article: Kemmishtree
Keltar, a handmade green plush one-eyed mushroom-shaped monster with two small fangs and a straight stitched mouth, front view, cut out on transparent background.
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."[5] 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."[21] In the papers section of the same software he writes in the voice of Maxine, the company's red demon; the guided tour explains that "Kemmishtree writes as Maxine for now".[22]

In the company's fiction, Keltar crossed into this dimension in 2012 to commune with "our founder Kent Kemmishtree".[23] 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."[24][4] 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!"[25]

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."[5] 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.[5][26] 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 a 2025 paper applied the Mamba neural-network architecture to nanopore signals without naming its method, he called it Mambapore himself, "because I'm a verbal anarchist."[27] He proposed "Universal Molecular Streaming" as a second name for the company's goal "because it's fewer syllables",[28] and he once found the game's first name, Epic Quest Biotechnology, "kind of generic, first-idea sounding".[1] Of the startup names of his field he has written that Roswell Biotechnologies was the one that made him "sooo jealous".[17]

Artificial intelligence

His stance on artificial intelligence is the source of the company's slogan, "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'."[28] 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!"[5]

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?"[14] 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."[14] 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."[5]

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."[5] 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."[5]

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.[3]
  • "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.[2]

Papers

  • "Medical bioremediation: a concept moving toward reality". Rejuvenation Research 12 (6): 411 to 419 (2009).[7]
  • "Molecular Threading: Mechanical Extraction, Stretching and Placement of DNA Molecules from a Liquid-Air Interface". PLoS ONE 8 (7): e69058 (2013).[8]

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".[2]
  • "Kent Kemmish(tree) Presents demonpore inc.", a video on the company's channel.[29]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Kemmish's CV lists Church last among the authors. The journal lists him twelfth.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p "Stanley Kent Kemmish, Jr." Molecular Reality Corporation. May 2026.
  3. ^ a b c d e "US10908144B2: Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof". Google Patents. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  4. ^ a b c d "Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 2026.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Kemmishtree (2025). "Epic Quest Bio". Molecular Reality Corporation.
  6. ^ a b c "Kent Kemmish". Lifeboat Foundation. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  7. ^ a b "Medical bioremediation: a concept moving toward reality". Rejuvenation Research 12 (6): 411-419. 2009. doi:10.1089/rej.2009.0917.
  8. ^ a b "Molecular Threading: Mechanical Extraction, Stretching and Placement of DNA Molecules from a Liquid-Air Interface". PLoS ONE 8 (7): e69058. 2013. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069058.
  9. ^ "Halcyon Molecular Quietly Shuts Down Sequencing Operation". Bio-IT World. August 20, 2012.
  10. ^ Shakespeare, William (1623). The Tempest. p. Act 4, scene 1.
  11. ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "Welcome to my Minds". EQBio-OS.
  12. ^ "WHOIS record for demonpore.com". Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  13. ^ best pore data yet (Video). EpicQuestBio.
  14. ^ a b c Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Focused Ion Beam pore". EQBio-OS.
  15. ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "rain of blood". EQBio-OS.
  16. ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Sequencing a string". EQBio-OS.
  17. ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Flossing with DNA". EQBio-OS.
  18. ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
  19. ^ "MR1 Nanopore Reader". GitHub. October 16, 2026.
  20. ^ "Relicense project to Public Domain under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0-1.0)" (commit a52fc0b). EpicQuestBio/MR1. October 21, 2026.
  21. ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "welcome". EQBio-OS.
  22. ^ "EQBio-OS tour". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2026.
  23. ^ "Keltar: Interdimensional Advisor to the Molecular Streaming Corps". Molecular Reality Corporation. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  24. ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Call me". EQBio-OS.
  25. ^ "Quests". EQBio-OS. Molecular Reality Corporation. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  26. ^ Vonnegut, Kurt (October 1961). "Harrison Bergeron". The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
  27. ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Mambapore". EQBio-OS.
  28. ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "Big Picture". EQBio-OS.
  29. ^ Kent Kemmish(tree) Presents demonpore inc. (Video). EpicQuestBio.
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