The rewards for biotechnology are tremendous - to solve disease, eliminate poverty, age gracefully. It sounds so much cooler than Facebook.
George M. Church
What dinosaur traits are missing from an ostrich? The ostrich has a toothless beak, but there are mutations that cause teeth and claws to come back to their mouth and limbs. You need to replace the feathers with scales, but there are no feathers on their legs and feet, so you just need to make its whole body like its legs are.
As part of our dedication to safety engineering in biology, we're trying to get better at creating physically contained test systems to develop something that eventually will be so biologically contained that we won't need physical containment anymore.
When something like personal genomics or synthetic biology suddenly appears - it seems to suddenly appear - we might have been working on it for 30 years, but it seems to come out of nowhere. Then you need strategies for engaging a lot of people and thinking about where it will be going in the next few months or few years.
Your genetics is not your destiny.
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.
Making new petroleum should be as simple and straightforward as brewing beer.
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.
If we can come up with a way of backing up my brain into another that I have in my back-pack, we'll do it. People talk themselves out of things very easily. Things that they think are a million years away, or never, are actually four years away.
What I really wanted was for everybody to have their genome and, ideally, everybody to share their genome, and for that, we needed to bring the price way down.
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.
You can't just hoard your ideas inside the ivory tower. You have to get them out into the world.
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.
Anytime you see somebody keeping a secret, that's symptomatic that something's wrong with the society around them. That means there's discrimination or worse.
My laboratory and my obsession is about safety and building/engineering safety. It's not just a matter of saying we want the world to be safer; we have to create technology.
It's all too easy to dismiss the future. People confuse what's impossible today with what's impossible tomorrow.
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.
If we go into space, we need enhancements that handle radiation and osteoporosis... or else we're dead. So what seems like an enhancement in one generation becomes life and death in another generation.
Reversal of ageing is high on my list of things to do, and not just because I'm getting old.
We have a love affair with the idea of the 'natural,' even though we, as a species, are about as unnatural as you can imagine.
Most groups patent ways of using genetic discoveries as part of non-obvious diagnostic and therapeutic protocols and slightly or greatly altered genes.
I always loved computers - it's something inside you.
I think my original inspiration came from just natural curiosity about science and math and biology. In particular, I would say that, as I matured, it became more a feeling of trying to avoid the waste that occurs in the world where we have 6.5 billion minds. If you're a computer scientist, you can think of them as supercomputers.
Very often, as I wander through life, I'll get that old feeling that I've come back from the future, and I'm living in the past. And it's a really horrible feeling.
I'll drop something for a while, a year or maybe several years, and then pick it up again. I think that's the way successful innovators work. They keep juggling ideas, keeping them in the air, in the back of their mind, to inspire them or enable new recombinations.
Every cell in our body, whether it's a bacterial cell or a human cell, has a genome. You can extract that genome - it's kind of like a linear tape - and you can read it by a variety of methods. Similarly, like a string of letters that you can read, you can also change it. You can write, you can edit it, and then you can put it back in the cell.
The World Wide Web went from zero to millions of web pages in a few years. Many revolutions look irrelevant just before they change everything swiftly.
I like talking and walking. It's more productive than doing just one.
People think it's great to be ahead of your time, but it can actually be quite painful.
The goal of getting your genome done is not to tell you what you will die from, but it's how to learn how to take action to prevent disease.
I'm pathologically calm.
I like to keep the median age in my lab low because they will indulge me in my dreams. They don't yet think things are impossible.
There's this very interesting and complicated connection between our environment and our genes and the traits that come out of the environment plus genes. And there's huge potential. I mean we see amazing abilities. Marie Curie, Albert Einstein. All sorts of arts, and literature and so forth. These are not typical traits of everybody on earth.
We might want to figure out what are the positive effects of autism - mild cases.
Science has very definite faith components, and most religions don't stick to faith. They venture out into making predictions about our physical world. They don't just say there's something that is completely unconnected to us. They say actually it affects a lot. And when they do that, they merge.
We know that there is a connection between our feelings and our brain.
There's a lot of faith expressed by scientists about science. It's kind of an act of faith that science is a good thing. We don't know that for sure. We may not know that millions of years from now.
Clearly, we are a species that is well connected to other species. Whether or not we evolve from them, we are certainly very closely related to them. A series of mutations could change us into all kinds of intermediate species. Whether or not those intermediate species are provably in the past, they could easily be in our future.
We have the ability to completely change our environment to go... to take on... to inherit, in a certain sense, things far beyond our DNA, and that's inheritable. And we can see evolution in action as our ideas evolve and undergo a kind of Darwinian selection not at the DNA level. And we can go off into space.
If you get a personal genome, you should be able to get personal cell lines, stem cell derived from your adult tissues, that allow you to bring together synthetic biology and the sequencing so that you can repair parts of your body as you age or repair things that were inherited disorders.
We went from a world where almost nobody knew anything about computers to a world where almost all of us are computer geeks for a huge fraction of our day. And I'd like to see that happen with the digital world of biological molecules, too.
Most people are excited about themselves. Personal genome will deliver for inexpensively something about science to which you can relate. Just like computers are becoming something to which you can relate. It should be even easier to relate to your own biology, and I hope that will be one of the ways we get broader literacy in science.
In my lab, we are constantly asking, 'What's the utility of this pure science that we're doing? Let's nudge it a little bit in a direction where people can connect to it and have some fun and/or help some very serious problems they have.'
I think something very simple that everybody can do is they can participate in medical research as subjects. Personal genome project, for example, will take on as many subjects as we can find.
Terrorism is not a public health threat, relative to cancer and heart disease and malaria and so forth.
It sounds a little bit too arrogant, but I think I certainly have a working model for how I conduct my life, and it may or may not be a correct worldview.
I will make the argument that we are poorly adapted to our current environment. I mean, we did not evolve to sit all day and be exposed to giant amounts of really tasty food.
We will have to make a decision, as we go into new environments outside of earth, whether we want to drag along with us all our pathogens. We can, or we can't - it's up to us - but I consider that part of genome engineering is how we interact with the huge part of our genome which is our microbiome.
A few dozen changes to the genome of a modern elephant - to give it subcutaneous fat, woolly hair and sebaceous glands - might suffice to create a variation that is functionally similar to the mammoth. Returning this keystone species to the tundras could stave off some effects of warming.
Aside from bringing back extinct species, reanimation could help living ones by restoring lost genetic diversity. The Tasmanian devil (aka Sarcophilus harrisii) is so inbred at this point that most species members can exchange tumor cells without rejection.
