George M. Church Quotes

If you get a personal genome, you should be able to get personal cell lines, stem cell derived from your adult tissues, that allow you to bring together synthetic biology and the sequencing so that you can repair parts of your body as you age or repair things that were inherited disorders.

I am opposed to both cloning and the destruction of human embryos and adamantly opposed to funding of embryonic stem cell research.

And of course, identifying all human genes and proteins will have great medical significance.

Now, as the world's scientists focus with increasing intensity on transforming the genetic codes of every living creature into information that can be used to treat and ultimately prevent disease, Shenzhen is home to a different kind of factory: B.G.I., formerly called Beijing Genomics Institute, the world's largest genetic-research center.

Genomic science, as the newest frontier in scholarly research, is throwing open the door to a revolutionary way of approaching our health, the health and welfare of animals, and the sustainability of our environment.

I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet.

I'm fascinated with genetic science, and I have been for a very long time. I always look at science and technology because I think that the developments in my lifetime have been so remarkable - and we're only at the tip of the iceberg with projects like decoding the human genome.

If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts.

Sadly, embryonic stem cell research is completely legal in this country and has been going on at universities and research facilities for years.

People think if you have deciphered the genome of humans that you can change everything. But you cannot change everything, because you do not know what the genes mean, and you have no methods for changing them, and you can't do experiments with humans like you can with animals.

I was working with stem cells as part of a NASA programme. We realised that the science of stem-cell proliferation was also fundamental to cancer cells when cancer enters the phase of metastasis.

During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project.

One of the things about genetics that has become clearer as we've done genomes - as we've worked our way through the evolutionary tree, including humans - is that we're probably much more genetic animals than we want to confess we are.

'Seconds' is very much about reaching out for the next thing after you've figured out the first thing.

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

There are lots of other issues in policy including the stem cell issue.

The important thing is that we now have the tools to sequence all kinds of animals and plants and microbes - as well as humans. It is not important that we didn't actually finish the human sequence yet.

There have been lots of stories written about all the hype over getting the genome done and the letdown of not discovering lots of cures right after.

I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt.

The day is not far off when we will be able to send a robotically controlled genome-sequencing unit in a probe to other planets to read the DNA sequence of any alien microbe life that may be there.

Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.

I think we can allow the therapeutic uses of nuclear transplant technology, which we call cloning, without running the danger of actually having live human beings born.

I would only once have the opportunity to let my scientific career encompass a path from the double helix to the three billion steps of the human genome.

I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.

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