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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

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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

" 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. "

George M. Church

" 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. "

George M. Church

" 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. "

George M. Church

" You can't just hoard your ideas inside the ivory tower. You have to get them out into the world. "

George M. Church

" 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

" 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

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

George M. Church

Straightforward

" 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. "

George M. Church

" 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. "

George M. Church

" 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.' "

George M. Church

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

George M. Church

" 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. "

George M. Church

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

George M. Church

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

George M. Church

" Science has very definite faith components, and most religions don't stick to faith. They venture out into making predictions about our physical world. They don't just say there's something that is completely unconnected to us. They say actually it affects a lot. And when they do that, they merge. "

George M. Church

" 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

" Most people are excited about themselves. Personal genome will deliver for inexpensively something about science to which you can relate. Just like computers are becoming something to which you can relate. It should be even easier to relate to your own biology, and I hope that will be one of the ways we get broader literacy in science. "

George M. Church

" 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

" 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. "

George M. Church

" 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. "

George M. Church

" I'm pathologically calm. "

George M. Church

" 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

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

George M. Church

" 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