George M. Church Quotes

We're dabbling in eugenics all the time, breeding ideal crops to replace less aesthetic or nutritious or hardy varieties; leveling forests to graze cattle or erect shopping malls and condos; planting groves of a few familiar trees that homeowners and industries prefer.

A fascinating challenge facing today's environmental movement is how to best approach the reversal of past decisions that altered once-pristine environmental spaces for the sake of urgent man-made needs.

By being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware.

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before.

Perhaps it matters little whether the international community chooses to celebrate crop diversity, but it profoundly matters that the international community takes action to conserve it.

With worms you can just change genes at random and see if you can find a mutant that does what you want it to do.

India has the opportunity to be a leader in genetic engineering, It has institutions that no other country has.

If we brought the mammoth back to Siberia, maybe that would be good for the ecosystems that are changing because of climate change.

If you can write DNA, you're no longer limited to 'what is' but to what you could make.

People have freaked out when I tell them that my dragons are scientifically based... what else can you call a genetically engineered life form?

In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.

Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.

Modern genetic engineering makes producing GMO food products relatively easy. GMOs can improve crop yield and greatly enhance the nutritional value of those same crops.

Traits acquired during one's lifetime - muscles built up in the gym, for example - cannot be passed on to the next generation. Now with technology, as it happens, we might indeed be able to transfer some of our acquired traits on to our selected offspring by genetic engineering.

How we understand our own selves and how we work with our DNA software has implications that will affect everything from vaccine development to new approaches to antibiotics, new sources of food, new sources of chemicals, even potentially new sources of energy.

Now that we can read and write the genetic code, put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life, it will be possible to speed up biological evolution to the pace of social evolution.

To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.

The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time.

If there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.

I was using very unconventional methods to sequence the telemetric DNA, originally.

New molecular methods that add or modify genes can protect plants from diseases and pests and improve crops in ways that are both more environmentally benign and beyond the capability of older methods.

What's different here is that we have now technologies that allow these life science companies to bypass classical breeding. That's what makes it both powerful and exciting.

We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.

The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.