Words matter. These are the best George M. Church Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
As part of our dedication to safety engineering in biology, we’re trying to get better at creating physically contained test systems to develop something that eventually will be so biologically contained that we won’t need physical containment anymore.
My laboratory and my obsession is about safety and building/engineering safety. It’s not just a matter of saying we want the world to be safer; we have to create technology.
The goal of reanimation research is not to make perfect living copies of extinct organisms, nor is it meant to be a one-off stunt in a laboratory or zoo. Reanimation is about leveraging the best of ancient and synthetic DNA.
We will have to make a decision, as we go into new environments outside of earth, whether we want to drag along with us all our pathogens. We can, or we can’t – it’s up to us – but I consider that part of genome engineering is how we interact with the huge part of our genome which is our microbiome.
The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore, the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.
Someone younger at heart should replace you, and that should be you. I’m willing to. I’m willing to become younger. I try to reinvent myself every few years anyway.
Your genetics is not your destiny.
You can’t just hoard your ideas inside the ivory tower. You have to get them out into the world.
I don’t actually believe there’s any such thing as privacy.
I think something very simple that everybody can do is they can participate in medical research as subjects. Personal genome project, for example, will take on as many subjects as we can find.
Very often, as I wander through life, I’ll get that old feeling that I’ve come back from the future, and I’m living in the past. And it’s a really horrible feeling.
How do you get things out of your head, out of your lab, and into the world? If you’re not part of the economic community, there’s a chance… you’ll fall behind.
I have a rule against saying something is impossible unless it violates laws of physics.
If society becomes comfortable with cloning and sees value in true human diversity, then the whole Neanderthal creature itself could be cloned by a surrogate mother chimp – or by an extremely adventurous female human.
Terrorism is not a public health threat, relative to cancer and heart disease and malaria and so forth.
You can make pigs that are essentially much closer to being universal donors. If it works, their organs will be going into people like you and me.
The World Wide Web went from zero to millions of web pages in a few years. Many revolutions look irrelevant just before they change everything swiftly.
Genomics is a new idea. Like the PC, it’s not obvious at first that anyone would want one. It’s like, ‘Hey, we’ve already got one genome, why do we need more?’
The rewards for biotechnology are tremendous – to solve disease, eliminate poverty, age gracefully. It sounds so much cooler than Facebook.
I always loved computers – it’s something inside you.
If we can come up with a way of backing up my brain into another that I have in my back-pack, we’ll do it. People talk themselves out of things very easily. Things that they think are a million years away, or never, are actually four years away.
Trees are essentially growing chairs. There are lots of primates that sit and sleep in them.
I’m a champion for personal differences. I have no sympathy for drug companies that can’t figure out how to make personalized medicine. We could generalize that to ‘All society should be much more personalized.’
I like to keep the median age in my lab low because they will indulge me in my dreams. They don’t yet think things are impossible.
It sounds a little bit too arrogant, but I think I certainly have a working model for how I conduct my life, and it may or may not be a correct worldview.
If you get a personal genome, you should be able to get personal cell lines, stem cell derived from your adult tissues, that allow you to bring together synthetic biology and the sequencing so that you can repair parts of your body as you age or repair things that were inherited disorders.
Preventing ongoing extinction of elephants, rhinoceroses, and other threatened species is critically important. By all means, we must set priorities for allocating finite conservation resources.
We have a love affair with the idea of the ‘natural,’ even though we, as a species, are about as unnatural as you can imagine.
Our ancestors didn’t need any genetic enhancements to be able to sit for twelve hours a day and eat fatty, sugary foods, but we need enhancements that handle that altered environment.
The goal of getting your genome done is not to tell you what you will die from, but it’s how to learn how to take action to prevent disease.
I like talking and walking. It’s more productive than doing just one.
The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then… assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone.
In my lab, we are constantly asking, ‘What’s the utility of this pure science that we’re doing? Let’s nudge it a little bit in a direction where people can connect to it and have some fun and/or help some very serious problems they have.’
Aside from bringing back extinct species, reanimation could help living ones by restoring lost genetic diversity. The Tasmanian devil (aka Sarcophilus harrisii) is so inbred at this point that most species members can exchange tumor cells without rejection.
I will make the argument that we are poorly adapted to our current environment. I mean, we did not evolve to sit all day and be exposed to giant amounts of really tasty food.
Reversal of ageing is high on my list of things to do, and not just because I’m getting old.
If we could take one of my skin cells and turn it into an embryo-like cell and turn it back into a skin cell, it has reset almost all of the developmental indications of age.
There are a few genetic traits that make people feel sorry for you, and there are some, like narcolepsy, at which people take personal offense unless you tell them in advance.
We know that there is a connection between our feelings and our brain.
It’s all too easy to dismiss the future. People confuse what’s impossible today with what’s impossible tomorrow.
