George M. Church Quotes

I can see no practical application of molecular biology to human affairs... DNA is a tangled mass of linear molecules in which the informational content is quite inaccessible.

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

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.

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

There's massive government initiatives going around the world, and you see that there's a real enthusiasm for genetics.

Patenting tends to get people's juices flowing when you put the word 'gene' and the word 'patent' in the same sentence. And understandably so. This is stuff we're carrying around - all of us - inside all of our cells. Should somebody be able to lay claim to it?

It once seemed that the most profound feats stemming from DNA-based science would spring from our ability to read and detect genes, which we call the science of genomics. But the real opportunities lie in our ability to write DNA, to synthesize new gene sequences and insert them into organisms, resulting in brand-new biological functions.

I wanted to rewrite the code of life, to make new molecular machines that would solve human problems.

In the test tube, I can make any DNA I want, recombining it from monkeys, worms, anywhere. So I can explore new rules of breeding with molecules.

If genetic research doesn't seemed to have lived up to its therapeutic promise, it's because sequencing is just too slow and expensive.

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

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.

Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.

Our increasing ability to alter our biology and open up the processes of life is now fueling a new cultural war.

Right now people are interested in genetic engineering to help the human race. That's a noble cause, and that's where we should be heading. But once we get past that - once we understand what genetic diseases we can deal with - when we start thinking about the future, there's an opportunity to create some new life-forms.

Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.

Imagine that: If you could change one of the genes in an experiment, an aging gene, maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan.

My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.

Just as computer technology and the Internet created whole new industries and extraordinary benefits for people that extend into almost every realm of human endeavor from education to transportation to medicine, genetics will undoubtedly benefit people everywhere in ways we can't even imagine but know will surely occur.

Here at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, we have genetically rearranged various viruses and bacteria as part of our medical research. In fact, we have been able to create entirely new types of DNA molecules by splicing together the genetic information from different organisms - recombinant DNA.

You can now modify the genes of large animals, and the largest animal we are concerned with is the human.

Genetic engineering of are own species is not a question of if, but only a question of when….The human race may bifurcate into two subspecies of humans: Enhanced and Unenhanced.

The Human Genome Project alone is the Full Employment Act for bioethicists.