Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?'

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.

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am 3.8 percent Neanderthal. One of my ancestors mated with a Neanderthal, and I am not embarrassed by that.

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

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.