Jamie Metzl > Quotes

“whatever your genes might predict, height can be stunted if you don’t get the nutrients you need as a child.”
― Jamie Metzl, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity

“We live in a world defined by uniformity but still identify ourselves by our mutations.”
― Jamie Metzl, Genesis Code

“If we only focus on racing forward, we will crash. But we will also crash if we cruise along with the status quo. Our goal cannot be to stop progress but to make sure we are moving forward as safely as possible. ..But if we are to be successful, this transformation cannot be built on fear alone. It must ultimately be built on hope.”
― Jamie Metzl

“All of the biggest threats we face can only be understood, and therefore addressed, in context. If we focus our gaze too narrowly, we won’t, by definition, see the big picture. If we only see the big picture, our heads will, literally, be in the clouds.”
― Jamie Metzl

“Although many gene-therapy protocols are now being actively explored, one of the most exciting and widely covered in the media is genetically enhancing the ability of a person’s T cells, white blood cells that play an essential role in the body’s natural immune response. In CAR-T therapy, blood cells are extracted from the body of a person with specific cancers and then engineered to boost the ability of their T cells to express a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) before being put back into the person’s body with cancer-fighting superpowers.”
― Jamie Metzl, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity

“The late Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote that we live our lives as a first draft that is also the finak text, a dress reherssl that is itself our final performance. We stitch little pieces of knowledge together to create understanding, but these flashes come too late to prevent the mistakes we've already made along the way. By the time we've learned enough about something to handle it properly, we've probably already fucked it up beyond repair.”
― Jamie Metzl

“After years of painstaking research, in 2006 Yamanaka and his team discovered that proteins encoded by just four “master genes” could turn back the clock and transform any adult cell back into a stem cell. Just as a stem cell could differentiate itself forward in developmental time into a skin, blood, liver, heart, or any other of the two hundred types of human cells, these Yamanaka factors could revert any skin, blood, liver, or other type of cell back into the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell.”
― Jamie Metzl, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity

“Scientists are also now using CRISPR not just to change the genes but also to alter the epigenetic marks dictating how the genes are expressed.5 Although early skeptics of human gene editing correctly warned that epigenetic influences on the expression of genes made effective gene editing a lot more complicated than first understood, recent advances have made clear that epigenetic editing is “on the verge of reprogramming gene expression at will.”
― Jamie Metzl, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity

“A girl dies. So what? People die all the time. We’re born. We kick around for a while. We die leaving scant trace.”
― Jamie Metzl, Genesis Code

“We wouldn’t expect to make perfectly fresh cheese from old milk, but it seems perfectly normal to us that two thirty-year-old adult humans can have a child who is born zero years old, not thirty or sixty. Clearly, our cells already have a way of resetting the clock.”
― Jamie Metzl, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity

“Six-month-old embryos could become genetic parents. Year-old frozen embryos (or three-month-old babies) could become grandparents.”
― Jamie Metzl, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity

“Shit flows downhill and only scientists call it gravity.”
― Jamie Metzl, Genesis Code

“The magic of life is its imprecision, the multiple narratives constantly unfolding before us. Every step we take, every decision we make, reshuffles the deck of our lives and sets a new trajectory of possibility in motion.”
― Jamie Metzl

“In 2012, Japanese cell biologists Katsuhiko Hayashi and Mitinori Saitou announced they had used the Yamanaka factors to reprogram adult mouse skin cells in a dish into iPS cells. They then added more chemicals to turn these stem cells into egg and sperm progenitor cells, the precursors of eggs and sperm. After they placed the same artificial cells into mouse ovaries, the cells matured into eggs. When they put induced sperm precursor into mouse testes, these cells matured into sperm. These induced eggs and sperm were used for mouse IVF, resulting in perfectly healthy baby mice.”
― Jamie Metzl, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity

“Making a thousand embryos could increase the average differential between the highest and lowest IQ of all the embryos to about twenty-five points.”
― Jamie Metzl, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity

“Then, in September 2018, Saitou and his collaborators announced they had induced egg precursor cells from human blood cells, which were then incubated in tiny ovaries developed from mouse embryonic cells.”
― Jamie Metzl, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity