George M. Church

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why would you not have a robot that looks like Abraham Lincoln? Why would it look like an erector set? Why use a computer with a punchcard, when you could use one with a touch pen on the screen? Why a car, when you could use a jetpack?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reversal of ageing is high on my list of things to do, and not just because I'm getting old.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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?'

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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'm pathologically calm.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.