Regenesis Quotes

“(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 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

“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

“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 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

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“Despite the fear evoked by the idea of genetically modified organisms, those of the natural variety are hard to beat when it comes to posing serious threats to humanity. Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of bubonic plague, is estimated to have killed as many as a third to a half of all Europeans in the Black Death epidemic of the mid-fourteenth century. The bacterium made a comeback appearance in the Great Plague, another wave of annihilation that swept through the Continent in 1665–1666.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“Neanderthal man was first discovered in August 1856, when miners working in a limestone quarry in the Neander Valley, near Düsseldorf, Germany, came upon a pile of bones.”
― 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

“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

“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

“If time travel ever becomes possible, the Carboniferous period, which lasted for some 74 million years, from about 360 million to 286 million years ago, would be a good era to avoid.”
― 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

“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

“Some protozoa, for example, have genomes that are over one hundred times larger than the human genome,”
― 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

“The rest of the organism was as natural as any other ordinary cell. Indeed, Venter’s synthetic genome depended on the rest of the recipient cell’s natural and native apparatus for its expression: it depended on the cell’s molecular machinery of transcription, translation, and replication, its ribosomes, metabolic pathways, its energy supplies, and so on.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“Second, “this work provides a proof of principle for producing cells based on genome sequences designed in the computer. DNA sequencing of a cellular genome allows storage of the genetic instructions of life as a digital file.” The reduction of genetic instructions to a digital file delivered a knockout second blow to vitalism.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“In nature, E. coli has 4,377 genes on a genome consisting of 4,639,221 base pairs. Blattner reduced the gene count of the laboratory K-12 strain by some 15 percent, thereby producing an organism that was optimized for laboratory, industrial, and academic research purposes.”
― 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

“Inside it, however, everything careens relentlessly toward self-replication, for within the space of about thirty minutes, the cell manages to duplicate with extreme precision each and every one of its component parts: its proteins, lipid molecules, even its own genome. And at the end of the process, the cell pinches itself in two, giving birth to a daughter cell clone, which will reproduce itself in another half hour.”
― George M. Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

“Individual E. coli cells are small, rod-shaped objects about four micrometers in length, easily visible in a light microscope. Extending from the cell’s surface are a number of long, corkscrew-shaped flagella. They propel the cell through a watery medium that, to them, is as viscous as molasses. At this scale, where gravity has little effect, there is no up or down. Since the average E. coli cell lives inside the human intestinal tract, the cell has no vision, and since it has no brain or nervous system, it has no conscious experience. But believe it or not, the bacterium has a primitive sense of perception.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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