Synthetic Biology Quotes

The greatest existential risks over the coming decades or century arise from certain, anticipated technological breakthroughs that we might make in particular, machine super intelligence, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Each of these has an enormous potential for improving the human condition by helping cure disease, poverty, etc. But one could imagine them being misused, used to create powerful weapon systems, or even some kind of accidental destructive scenario, where we suddenly are in possession of some technology that's far more powerful than we are able to control or use wisely.

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

Sometime in the future, I am a hundred percent certain scientists will sit down at a computer terminal, design what they want the organism to do, and build it.

The whole point of cryopreserving only one's head is based on the idea that one can simply grow in the laboratory an entire new body, without a head, and stick it onto the cryopreserved head.

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

But the prospects of designing chemical plants for industrial scale chemical processes seemed far less interesting than the chemical events that occur in biological systems.

The potential for synthetic biology and biotechnology is vast; we all have an opportunity to create the future together.

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.

Ever since we achieved a breakthrough in the area of recombinant DNA in 1973, left-wing nuts and environmental kooks have been screaming that we will create some kind of Frankenstein bug or Andromeda Strain that will destroy us all.

We're beginning to enter an era where it gets really cheap and really fast to begin to do things like make fuels, and make textiles, and make extra teeth for ourselves. And we're beginning to think about how we regrow our bladders.

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.

Better biofuels are a really big deal. That means we can precisely engineer the molecules in the fuel chain and optimize them along the way. So, if all goes well, they're going to have designer bugs in warm vats that are eating and digesting sugars to excrete better biofuels. I guess that's better living through bugs.

In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees.

Just as gene drives can make mosquitos unfit for spreading the malaria parasite, they could concavely be designed with gene drives carrying cargo for delivering lethal bacterial toxins to humans.

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.

Printing novel DNA might open the way to achievements once only conceivable in science fiction: designer bacteria that can produce new chemicals, such as more efficient fuels, or synthetic versions of our cells that make us resistant to the effects of radiation.

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?

… work on synthetic biology, or synbio, had become so cheap that its practitioners were no longer classically trained biologists. This meant that there were no shared assumptions regarding the new field’s ethics, professional standards, or safety.

Cloning interferon was not something I wanted to get into.

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

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.

Writing genetic code like we do software will usher in a completely new way of living for all of us. When this happens, our society will be as fundamentally changed as we have seen from the invention of computers.

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

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.

Manufacturing takes place in very large facilities. If you want to build a computer chip, you need a giant semiconductor fabrication facility. But nature can grow complex molecular machines using nothing more than a plant.