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" 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

" 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. "

" It sounds a little bit too arrogant, but I think I certainly have a working model for how I conduct my life, and it may or may not be a correct worldview. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We have the ability to completely change our environment to go... to take on... to inherit, in a certain sense, things far beyond our DNA, and that's inheritable. And we can see evolution in action as our ideas evolve and undergo a kind of Darwinian selection not at the DNA level. And we can go off into space. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" What I really wanted was for everybody to have their genome and, ideally, everybody to share their genome, and for that, we needed to bring the price way down. "

George M. Church

Down

Genome

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Aging

Rare

" 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. "

" We might want to figure out what are the positive effects of autism - mild cases. "

" 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. "

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

" We have lots of Neanderthal parts around the lab. We are creating Neanderthal cells. Let's say someone has a healthy, normal Neanderthal baby. Well, then, everyone will want to have a Neanderthal kid. Were they superstrong or supersmart? Who knows? But there's one way to find out. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "