The Man Mapping the Marijuana Genome Is Changing the Weed Game
Because he’s a scientist, not a back-slapping venture capitalist, Mowgli Holmes loathes using the term networking to describe even the portion of his job that entails shaking hands in the cannabis industry. But it was networking that brought the chief scientific officer of Phylos Bioscience in Portland, Oregon, to Las Vegas in November 2014 to attend the Marijuana Business Conference and Expo—and to smoke a massive joint with one of the cannabis movement’s legends, Ohio lawyer Don Wirtshafter.
Holmes had it on good information that Wirtshafter was sitting on a collection of hundreds of very old apothecary bottles filled with antique cannabis tinctures—relics from before marijuana prohibition came along in 1937, courtesy of the weed-criminalizing Marihuana Tax Act. Holmes, a 43-year-old geneticist with a doctorate in microbiology and immunology from Columbia University, desperately wanted those bottles—at least what viable strands of DNA might lie inside of them—for a project that has become...
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