Top 30 George M. Church Quotes

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.’

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.

Anytime you see somebody keeping a secret, that’s symptomatic that something’s wrong with the society around them. That means there’s discrimination or worse.

Letting the tundra melt is the equivalent to burning all of the forests in all of the world and their roots two and a half times over.

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.

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.

Neanderthals might think differently than we do. They could even be more intelligent than us. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet, it’s conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.

The best way to predict the future is to change it.

Trees are essentially growing chairs. There are lots of primates that sit and sleep in them.

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.

I don’t actually believe there’s any such thing as privacy.

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.

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.

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

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.

Making new petroleum should be as simple and straightforward as brewing beer.

Most groups patent ways of using genetic discoveries as part of non-obvious diagnostic and therapeutic protocols and slightly or greatly altered genes.

We went from a world where almost nobody knew anything about computers to a world where almost all of us are computer geeks for a huge fraction of our day. And I’d like to see that happen with the digital world of biological molecules, too.

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.

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.

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.

It’s all too easy to dismiss the future. People confuse what’s impossible today with what’s impossible tomorrow.

I am 3.8 percent Neanderthal. One of my ancestors mated with a Neanderthal, and I am not embarrassed by that.

I would argue that we’re not limited by actual DNA. You can re-create the ancient DNA by looking at the genomes of existing animals.

At some point, someone will come up with an airtight argument as to why they should have a cloned child. At that point, cloning will be acceptable.

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.

You should have personalized genomics, personalized physiology, personalized medicine, where each person’s different, and each body is an integrated whole.

There’s a lot of faith expressed by scientists about science. It’s kind of an act of faith that science is a good thing. We don’t know that for sure. We may not know that millions of years from now.

We know that there is a connection between our feelings and our brain.

Terrorism is not a public health threat, relative to cancer and heart disease and malaria and so forth.