George M. Church Quotes

Industrial opportunities are going to stem more from the biological sciences than from chemistry and physics. I see biology as being the greatest area of scientific breakthroughs in the next generation.

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 next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.

Biology is now accelerating at a pace faster than Moore's Law.

I decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together.

We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.

Biological engineering is not necessarily understanding systems but rather, I want to be able to design and build biological systems to perform particular applications.

In the earlier years when I started this project at Stanford University, everyone told me it was nuts to go and try to reproduce the mysterious complexities that occur in a whole cell.

The first generation of biotech physically cut and pasted from one organism to another. You learned that taxol helped cure cancer, then you found the source organism and extracted the genes to make your drug. Now physical science is becoming information science.

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.

Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it's a very small percentage of the total. That's been changing in the last few years.

I think I've achieved some good things; doing the first genome in history - my team on that was phenomenal and all the things they pulled together; writing the first genome with a synthetic cell; my teams at the Venter Institute, Human Longevity, and before that Celera.

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

In the past, biology has been a backwater type of activity - a bunch of nerds in a lab. Now the sheer potential of biology to re-program our physical world is a new reality for everyone.

Our world is built on biology and once we begin to understand it, it then becomes a technology.

I like to think of synthetic biology as liquid alchemy, only instead of transmuting precious metals, you're synthesizing new biological functionality inside very small channels. It's called microfluidics.

The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.

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.

Bio-technology is the science of the future.

But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.

Synthetic biology can help address key challenges facing the planet and its population. Research in synthetic biology may lead to new things such as programmed cells that self-assemble at the sites of disease to repair damage.

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.

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.

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.