Quotes from George M. Church

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

I'm pathologically calm.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

We know that there is a connection between our feelings and our brain.

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.'

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.

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

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.

I have faith that science is a good thing. Seriously, I'd say that I am very much in awe of nature. In fact, I think to some extent, "awe" was a word that was almost invented for scientists.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.