Sorenson was the founding donor of the University Venture Fund, which leverages the inventions of students. The fund's annual conference ended Saturday, and it attracted more than 200 students from 20 colleges and universities around the country.

Sorenson loved to be around students and was phenomenal with genetics ideas, he said.

When a person thinks about Sorenson, Brittain added, "you start thinking of Thomas Edison and other people who have hugely inventive minds."

• Scott R. Woodward, director of the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation: "He was a great guy. He's really going to be missed." The foundation is creating a database of correlated genetic and genealogical information about people around the world. Woodward worked closely with Sorenson for the past eight years on the project.

Through the foundation's work, Sorenson hoped to demonstrate how closely people are related to each other. He wanted to "change the way people think about each other," Woodward said, which could prompt them to treat each other better.