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All Quotes by author - George M. Church

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A scenario is, everyone takes gene therapy - not just curing rare diseases like cystic fibrosis, but diseases that everyone has, like aging. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Clearly, we are a species that is well connected to other species. Whether or not we evolve from them, we are certainly very closely related to them. A series of mutations could change us into all kinds of intermediate species. Whether or not those intermediate species are provably in the past, they could easily be in our future. "

" Every cell in our body, whether it's a bacterial cell or a human cell, has a genome. You can extract that genome - it's kind of like a linear tape - and you can read it by a variety of methods. Similarly, like a string of letters that you can read, you can also change it. You can write, you can edit it, and then you can put it back in the cell. "

" 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?' "

" 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 always loved computers - it's something inside you. "

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

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

" I don't think it is about stalling or curing: it's about reversing. Curing gives you the impression of immortality. Stalling gives you the impression that you'll be 85 forever, which is not great. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If we go into space, we need enhancements that handle radiation and osteoporosis... or else we're dead. So what seems like an enhancement in one generation becomes life and death in another generation. "

" 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. "

" If you get very fine, accurate, and inexpensive control over your genome, you can fundamentally change the kind of organism you are. You are extending human capacity. "

" I have a rule against saying something is impossible unless it violates laws of physics. "

" I like talking and walking. It's more productive than doing just one. "

" 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. "

" I'll drop something for a while, a year or maybe several years, and then pick it up again. I think that's the way successful innovators work. They keep juggling ideas, keeping them in the air, in the back of their mind, to inspire them or enable new recombinations. "

" 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'm pathologically calm. "

" 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.' "

" I think my original inspiration came from just natural curiosity about science and math and biology. In particular, I would say that, as I matured, it became more a feeling of trying to avoid the waste that occurs in the world where we have 6.5 billion minds. If you're a computer scientist, you can think of them as supercomputers. "

" 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. "

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

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