Jeremy Rifkin Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

We have created life.

I wanted to rewrite the code of life, to make new molecular machines that would solve human problems.

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

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.

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

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.

India has the opportunity to be a leader in genetic engineering, It has institutions that no other country has.

People have freaked out when I tell them that my dragons are scientifically based... what else can you call a genetically engineered life form?

Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.

If there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.

What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.

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.

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

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.

If you get very fine, accurate, and inexpensive control over your genome, you can fundamentally change the kind of organism you are. You are extending human capacity.

I'm interested in using evolution to move forward into the future, to get biology to do a lot of new chemistry for us.

It once seemed that the most profound feats stemming from DNA-based science would spring from our ability to read and detect genes, which we call the science of genomics. But the real opportunities lie in our ability to write DNA, to synthesize new gene sequences and insert them into organisms, resulting in brand-new biological functions.

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.

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.

The goal of reanimation research is not to make perfect living copies of extinct organisms, nor is it meant to be a one-off stunt in a laboratory or zoo. Reanimation is about leveraging the best of ancient and synthetic DNA.

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