Erwin Chargaff Quotes

Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.

Genetic pollution is considerably more dangerous than oil spills. You can’t just go out there and put a boom around it and put it back in.

The Church warns against the attempts to use the scientific and technological progress for establishing control over the inner world of the personality, for creating any technologies making it possible to infuse and manipulate the human consciousness or sub-consciousness.

When the correct tests are done, GM products are as safe as their non-GM counterparts.

Only engineers would do something like random mutagenesis.

Biohackers want to tinker; do fun science; and, in the process, accelerate the pace of biotech innovation.

American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains.

These days vampires gravitated toward particle accelerators, projects to decode the genome, and molecular biology. Once they had flocked to alchemy, anatomy, and electricity. If it went bang, involved blood, or promised to unlock the secrets of the universe, there was sure to be a vampire around.

In this century, not only has science changed the world faster than ever, but in new and different ways. Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains - may change human beings themselves.

The fact is that humans have been shaping the genetics of what they eat for thousands of years. Genetic engineering simply speeds up the process that used to take generations. Preventing people from getting things like golden rice or disease-resistant cassava destroys human life, and does not spare the environment in any way.

Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.

I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.

...it is the Far Right today that establishes the terms of the nuclear debate. And in this context, in a room ringing with hysterical pleas on behalf of Reagan's eerie laser-beam technology, the MacBundys of the world seem eminently, refreshingly sane.

That's what people do when they find a special place that wild and full of life, they trample it to death.

When we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up. Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.

The technology of synthetic biology is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue.

Some kids get called "bundles of joy" or "slices of heaven" or "dreams come true." We got "the fifty-fourth generation of DNA experiments." Doesn't have the same warm and fuzzy feel. But maybe I'm oversensitive.

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.

The recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.

There is no reason why a company like Monsanto, for example, that is pushing GMOs, cannot go to Kenya, partner with the university, partner with the research institutions, and try to promote - in a responsible way - advanced techniques to help farmers. But this should be done in such a way that the farmers' livelihoods are not undermined because the government is irresponsible or careless, or because it is compromised.

Genetic scientists say that one day it will be possible to grow new body parts, like new breasts and new hands. It's going to be a huge moneymaker, because you know that as soon as women grow another breast, men will want another hand.

I think: the powers like to talk about "freedom" in order to wash the population's brains.

Man can be scientifically manipulated.

Today, in the Twenty-First Century, an age of jet aircraft, personal computers, wireless telecommunications, laser surgery, and incipient space travel, the mentality with which many presumably educated, intelligent people approach matters of economics and business is, however astonishing it may seem, still that of the Dark Ages.

I think a big misconception about GMOs is that there is a scientific consensus on their safety.