George M. Church Quotes

Human beings have been manipulating the biological world for thousands of years without understanding how DNA codes function.

Now that we can read and write the genetic code, put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life, it will be possible to speed up biological evolution to the pace of social evolution.

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

By being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware.

The Human Genome Project has given us a genetic parts list.

We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before.

If you can write DNA, you're no longer limited to 'what is' but to what you could make.

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.

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.

I had become monomaniacal about DNA only in 1951 when I had just turned 23 and as a postdoctoral fellow was temporarily in Naples attending a small May meeting on biologically important macromolecules.

In chemicals, Synthetic Genomics is one of my real loves.

We've been modifying the biological world at the level of DNA for thousands of years. Somehow there is this new fear of what we already have been doing and that fear has limited our ability to provide real solutions.

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.

Modern genetic engineering makes producing GMO food products relatively easy. GMOs can improve crop yield and greatly enhance the nutritional value of those same crops.

Genes that underlie the capacity to receive, use and transmit information are the evolving properties.

It's possible that we could change a human gene and double our life span. I don't know if that's true, but we can't rule that out.

Traits acquired during one's lifetime - muscles built up in the gym, for example - cannot be passed on to the next generation. Now with technology, as it happens, we might indeed be able to transfer some of our acquired traits on to our selected offspring by genetic engineering.

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.

I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.

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.

So that's when I saw the DNA model for the first time, in the Cavendish, and that's when I saw that this was it. And in a flash you just knew that this was very fundamental.

Physical studies of DNA had, of course, been under way for some years before analysis of virus particles began.

DNA, like a tape recording, carries a message in which there are specific instructions for a job to be done.

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.