George M. Church > Quotes

“Every disease that’s with us is caused by DNA. And every disease can be fixed by DNA.”
― George M. Church

“(The genomes of two individual humans differ by an average of about 3 million positions, which is approximately 0.1 percent of the total. Most of these are single base changes or changes in tandem repeat lengths.)”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“The genome constitutes only about 1 percent of the dry weight of a cell, which means that only a tiny proportion of the cell is actually synthetic.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“The Pleistocene epoch lasted from about 2.5 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“The appearance of DNA some 3,900 million years ago makes it the most ancient of all ancient texts.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“The Pleistocene witnessed the rise of the charismatic megafauna, animal species that included the woolly mammoth, Neanderthal man, and Homo sapiens.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“Still, it is possible to outlaw entire technologies. In 2006 Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Wired magazine, did a study of the effectiveness of technology prohibitions across the last thousand years, beginning in the year 1000. During this period governments had banned numerous technologies and inventions, including crossbows, guns, mines, nuclear bombs, electricity, automobiles, large sailing ships, bathtubs, blood transfusions, vaccines, television, computers, and the Internet. Kelly found that few technology prohibitions had any staying power and that in general, the more recent the prohibition, the shorter its duration. Figure Epilogue Kevin Kelly’s chart of the duration of a technology prohibition plotted against the year in which it was imposed.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“A version of this text is found in each nucleated cell of our bodies, and it consists of 700 megabytes of information (6 billion DNA base pairs). It contains not only a rich historical archive but also practical recipes for making human beings. For such a significant text, its translation into modern languages began only recently, in the 1970s.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“The third industrial revolution (1750–1850) was one of the great turning points in human history. Key elements of the transformation were the change from artisanal, custom-made, hand-tooled methods of producing material goods to machine-tooled, assembly-line, and standardized mass production systems. These changes allowed for unprecedented levels of income growth and wealth accumulation, sustained increases in agricultural production, human population growth, and enhanced well-being.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“Having journeyed from inorganic to organic and having considered the handedness of simple monomers, we now take a look at polymers, the next big idea in the story of the past and future of life.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“The synthetic minimal cell would enable the production of materials too large or otherwise incompatible with the more elaborate functioning systems of a complex cell. It also represents our best shot at a general nanotech assembler, the dream of Eric Drexler and many nanotechnology enthusiasts since he first described it in his 1986 book Engines of Creation. We could then harness these synthetic minimal cells and put them to use in drug, vaccine, chemical, and biofuel development.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“These enormous dimensions were possible because at that time oxygen made up 35 percent of total air volume (rather than our current wimpy 21 percent).”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“Second, cells are made of proteins, which constitute some 20 percent of a given cell by weight. The term “protein” comes from a Greek word that means “primary” or “first thing,” and a typical bacterium may possess several thousand different types of them.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“And then, according to the scientific publication describing the experiment, “at day 162 postfusion, we performed a caesarean section . . . One bucardo female weighing 2.6 kg [5.7 pounds] was obtained alive without external morphological abnormalities. The newborn displayed a normal cardiac rhythm as well as other vital signs at delivery (i.e., open eyes, mouth opening, legs and tongue movements) . . . To our knowledge, this is the first animal born from an extinct subspecies.” It was Wednesday, July 30, 2003, a turning point in the history of biology. For on that date, all at once, extinction was no longer forever.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“Through his lenses Leeuwenhoek saw one-celled protozoa, blood cells, sperm cells, and many other “animalcules,” as he called them. In 1683, pressing against the limit of his ability to discriminate the fine structure of this microscopic underworld, Leeuwenhoek saw bacteria (derived from tooth scrapings), and he vividly described and drew relatively accurate pictures of them.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“Building a living cell that is genuinely synthetic is one of the goals of synthetic biology.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“To be a cell, then, is to be a deterministic system governed by DNA, composed largely of proteins and lipids, and energized by ATP. Some cells are more like us than you may imagine—E. coli, for example, the standard organism of genetic engineering.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“The smallpox viruses, Variola major and minor, are thought to have caused more deaths than any other disease in human history, wiping out as many as 300 to 500 million people in the twentieth century alone. (The disease was eradicated in 1979.) Tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, AIDS—all are products of microbial agents of mass destruction that are natural in origin.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“Getting E. coli to churn out jet fuel is nothing compared to T4 phage viruses getting the same bacterium to fabricate more of themselves; the phages are far more complex entities than simple kerosene molecules.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“A cell’s membrane, which constitutes its outer surface, is composed of lipid molecules.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“First in importance are the nucleic acids, DNA and RNA, which contain the genetic information, the software of life.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“According to a standard account (which is probably correct), genetic engineering in the modern sense was born in 1972, when two biologists met for a late-night snack at a delicatessen near Waikiki beach in Hawaii. Stanford University medical professor Stanley Cohen and biochemist Herbert Boyer, of the University of California–San Francisco, were in Honolulu to attend a conference on plasmids, the circular strands of DNA found in the cytoplasm of bacteria.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“Collectively, these three cellular elements—nucleic acids, proteins, and the lipid bilayer membrane—exist for the purpose of maintaining the cell as a living system, but for this it needs a fourth class of materials, sugars (saccharides, typically glucose or sucrose).”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“website Kickstarter.com (“A New Way to Fund and Follow Creativity”), where inventors, entrepreneurs, and dreamers of every stripe could post their wild schemes and pet projects and ask for money to fund them. BioCurious announced an initial goal of $30,000. The partners were soon oversubscribed, almost overwhelmed, with 239 backers pledging $35,319. In the fall of 2010 Gentry and her partners were looking to lease 3,000 square feet of industrial space in Mountain View, but in the end settled for a 2,400 square feet in Sunnyvale, calling it “Your Bay Area hackerspace for biotech.” In December 2010, meanwhile, another DIY biohacker lab, Genspace, opened in Brooklyn, New York. The founders referred to it as “the world’s first permanent, biosafety level 1 community laboratory” (genspace.org). Many others soon followed, in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. With free synthetic biology kits, DIYbio, Livly lab, BioCurious, Genspace, and others, the synthetic biology genie was well and truly out of the bottle.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“Glaciers covered as much as 30 percent of the earth’s total land area, and in North America the ice sheet at one point extended as far south as what is now Chicago.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“How then do we create a truly minimal living cell that is also genuinely synthetic?”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“But let’s consider replacing complexity with the notion of replicated complexity (which can be shortened to “replexity”), or”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“In general, cells are small objects. Bacteria range from 0.5 to 750 microns, human cells from 5 microns to 1 meter in length. (A micron is a millionth of a meter; for comparison purposes, a human red blood cell is about 5 microns across.)”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“(Biodegradation is not necessarily the panacea it was once thought to be, since it releases greenhouse gases, while non-degradation, ironically, sequesters carbon.)”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“Technologies also make sharing more personally valuable, for example, discussing which new drugs to take for cancer, AIDS, or depression. In forums such as PatientsLikeMe and PersonalGenomes.org, individuals communicate information to benefit people around the world.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves