George M. Church

Scientist

1954-08-28

Quotes by George M. Church

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• When something like personal genomics or synthetic biology suddenly appears - it seems to suddenly appear - we might have been working on it for 30 years, but it seems to come out of nowhere. Then you need strategies for engaging a lot of people and thinking about where it will be going in the next few months or few years.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• What dinosaur traits are missing from an ostrich? The ostrich has a toothless beak, but there are mutations that cause teeth and claws to come back to their mouth and limbs. You need to replace the feathers with scales, but there are no feathers on their legs and feet, so you just need to make its whole body like its legs are.

  Read quote

• The rewards for biotechnology are tremendous - to solve disease, eliminate poverty, age gracefully. It sounds so much cooler than Facebook.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• We have the ability to completely change our environment to go... to take on... to inherit, in a certain sense, things far beyond our DNA, and that's inheritable. And we can see evolution in action as our ideas evolve and undergo a kind of Darwinian selection not at the DNA level. And we can go off into space.

  Read quote

• A few dozen changes to the genome of a modern elephant - to give it subcutaneous fat, woolly hair and sebaceous glands - might suffice to create a variation that is functionally similar to the mammoth. Returning this keystone species to the tundras could stave off some effects of warming.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote