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MOWGLI HOLMES
AGE: 51
BEST KNOWN FOR: Collecting cannabis DNA data of small Oregon farmers a decade ago, then telling investors in 2019 that his company would start growing plants itself.
Every Eden contains a serpent—and in 2019, Mowgli Holmes was cast as the devil in Oregon’s garden of weed.
For years, he and his company, Phylos Bioscience, had worked with small Oregon cannabis farmers to catalog the DNA of their weed strains. Then, in 2019, he was caught on camera in Florida telling investors his company would begin breeding its own cannabis plants, seemingly in competition with farmers who had entrusted him with their genetic data. (Holmes always maintained he never intended to use the data he collected from Oregon growers for his own benefit.)
The video went viral. Within weeks, the entire Oregon weed industry turned on the quiet Columbia Ph.D. scientist with salt-and-pepper hair (“Paradise Lost,” WW, May 22, 2019). Holmes stepped down from the company, then disappeared from the public eye for several years, though he continued to live in Portland with his family.
He’s now the founder and CEO of California-based Submarine, which Holmes says is a public benefit corporation that uses “supercomputer earth system modeling and AI to build the data layer for the new ocean-based carbon dioxide removal endeavor.”
Holmes further explains, in 300-word description to WW with lots of big words, that his company helps collect data for other companies that are trying to pull “hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 back out of the air.”
He adds: “We’re doing all the ocean modeling and data work to support those companies.”
Holmes says he’s no longer involved in the cannabis industry, calling the Phylos debacle a “wake-up call that it was time to start thinking about how to get work on something more critical (like the fact that the planet is getting hotter every year).”
Not all is sunny for Holmes. Court filings show he’s going through a divorce and a custody battle for his two children. He’s living in a family home in rural Colton, Ore., that lies on 6 acres of farmland.
After 2019, Phylos trudged on without Holmes. It still breeds cannabis strains and is partly led by Nishan Karassik, Holmes’ original business partner in the company.
“We made a lot of mistakes, or I did,” Holmes says. “But things heal over.”