George M. Church Quotes

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George M. Church

Profession : Scientist

Birth : August 28, 1954

You can make pigs that are essentially much closer to being universal donors. If it works, their organs will be going into people like you and me.

George M. Church

How do you get things out of your head, out of your lab, and into the world? If you're not part of the economic community, there's a chance... you'll fall behind.

George M. Church

I have a rule against saying something is impossible unless it violates laws of physics.

George M. Church

Genomics is a new idea. Like the PC, it's not obvious at first that anyone would want one. It's like, 'Hey, we've already got one genome, why do we need more?'

George M. Church

A scenario is, everyone takes gene therapy - not just curing rare diseases like cystic fibrosis, but diseases that everyone has, like aging.

George M. Church

Someone younger at heart should replace you, and that should be you. I'm willing to. I'm willing to become younger. I try to reinvent myself every few years anyway.

George M. Church

I am 3.8 percent Neanderthal. One of my ancestors mated with a Neanderthal, and I am not embarrassed by that.

George M. Church

We have lots of Neanderthal parts around the lab. We are creating Neanderthal cells. Let's say someone has a healthy, normal Neanderthal baby. Well, then, everyone will want to have a Neanderthal kid. Were they superstrong or supersmart? Who knows? But there's one way to find out.

George M. Church

Trees are essentially growing chairs. There are lots of primates that sit and sleep in them.

George M. Church

The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then... assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone.

George M. Church

The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore, the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.

George M. Church

If society becomes comfortable with cloning and sees value in true human diversity, then the whole Neanderthal creature itself could be cloned by a surrogate mother chimp - or by an extremely adventurous female human.

George M. Church

Neanderthals might think differently than we do. They could even be more intelligent than us. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet, it's conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.

George M. Church