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" I am 3.8 percent Neanderthal. One of my ancestors mated with a Neanderthal, and I am not embarrassed by that. "
George M. Church
Embarrassed
I Am
Percent
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" 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. "
George M. Church
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" 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. "
George M. Church
Help
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" 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. "
George M. Church
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" 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. "
George M. Church
You
Become
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" Most groups patent ways of using genetic discoveries as part of non-obvious diagnostic and therapeutic protocols and slightly or greatly altered genes. "
George M. Church
Most
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" I always loved computers - it's something inside you. "
George M. Church
Computers
You
Always
" 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. "
George M. Church
Environment
Eat
Ancestors
" 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. "
George M. Church
Work
Back
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" 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?' "
George M. Church
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" 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. "
George M. Church
Future
Feeling
Old
" There's this very interesting and complicated connection between our environment and our genes and the traits that come out of the environment plus genes. And there's huge potential. I mean we see amazing abilities. Marie Curie, Albert Einstein. All sorts of arts, and literature and so forth. These are not typical traits of everybody on earth. "
George M. Church
Amazing
Earth
Environment
" It's all too easy to dismiss the future. People confuse what's impossible today with what's impossible tomorrow. "
George M. Church
Today
People
Future
" Making new petroleum should be as simple and straightforward as brewing beer. "
George M. Church
Simple
Straightforward
Beer
" 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. "
George M. Church
Mouth
Need
Feathers
" 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. "
George M. Church
Animals
Ancient
Looking
" 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. "
George M. Church
Think
Medical
Research
" You can't just hoard your ideas inside the ivory tower. You have to get them out into the world. "
George M. Church
You
World
Tower
" 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. "
George M. Church
Society
Wrong
Discrimination
" 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. "
George M. Church
Intelligent
Way
Time
" 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. "
George M. Church
Day
Argument
Environment
" 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. "
George M. Church
Computers
Nobody
World
" 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. "
George M. Church
Change
Everything
Web
" Trees are essentially growing chairs. There are lots of primates that sit and sleep in them. "
George M. Church
Chairs
Growing
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. "
George M. Church
You
Create
Done
" Your genetics is not your destiny. "
George M. Church
Genetics
Your
Destiny
" 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.' "
George M. Church
Fun
Help
People
" 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. "
George M. Church
Brain
People
Talk
" We know that there is a connection between our feelings and our brain. "
George M. Church
Our
Connection
Brain
" 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. "
George M. Church
Need
Death
Space
" 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. "
George M. Church
Resources
Other
Important