We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.
Not only are we reading life code, we're beginning to copy it through cloning, and we're beginning to write, and in the measure that we do that, boy, you can build a lot of very powerful companies in a short period of time.
Reversal is something that has been demonstrated in a number of different animals in a number of different ways. I think that's going to translate into larger animals and humans. We won't know until we try. But we are trying 65 different genes in different combinations to see if we can reproduce the aging reversal that we've seen in small animals.
Once we understand just how to control genes, we have the potential for spinal cord regeneration, bone regeneration, and so on. It might also give us plumper chickens.
This is a whole new era where we're moving beyond little edits on single genes to being able to write whatever we want throughout the genome. The goal is to be able to change it as radically as our understanding permits.
You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.
No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?
With worms you can just change genes at random and see if you can find a mutant that does what you want it to do.
From a scientist's perspective, to understand everything that you need to know about human beings, you only have to tinker with all the mechanical parts of genes and the brain until there are no more secrets left.
We are sometimes asked what the result would be if we put four +'s in one gene. To answer this my colleagues have recently put together not merely four but six +'s.
Realizing the ways in which we humans may have been inadvertently changing our genes for millennia provides a way for us to begin to think about the inevitable genetic revolution in medicine that is going to allow us to advertently change our genes over centuries and even decades.
My idea right from the beginning, I guess, was to dismantle the immune system one gene at a time so we could track the mutations that cause problems.
