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" 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

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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

" 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. "

George M. Church

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

George M. Church

" 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. "

George M. Church

" Reversal is something that has been demonstrated in a number of different animals in a number of different ways. I think that's going to translate into larger animals and humans. We won't know until we try. But we are trying 65 different genes in different combinations to see if we can reproduce the aging reversal that we've seen in small animals. "

George M. Church

" People think it's great to be ahead of your time, but it can actually be quite painful. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

George M. Church

" I'm pathologically calm. "

George M. Church

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

George M. Church

" My laboratory and my obsession is about safety and building/engineering safety. It's not just a matter of saying we want the world to be safer; we have to create technology. "

George M. Church

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

George M. Church

" 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. "

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

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

George M. Church

" 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. "

George M. Church

" 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

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

George M. Church

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

George M. Church

" 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

" 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. "

George M. Church

" 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. "

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