‘It’s always too early to say something’s impossible’

George Church on rewriting the genome, exponential synthetic biology and having a longevity methodology.

Think about genomic science, and you think about George Church. Dubbed the ‘father of genomics’, he helped to initiate the Human Genome Project, and he is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He is also Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and leads Synthetic Biology at the Wyss Institute.

My take on this: It’s not long, now, until RAADfest, and Professor Church is a keynote speaker, presenting on Technologies to radically alter our genomes: why and how?, and participating in a live Q&A. I sat down with him to discuss cellular reprogramming, the problem with biomarkers and gene therapy levers – and he also teased that he’ll be presenting some as-yet-unpublished data at RAADfest…

George Church on the need for methodology

There’s been a tendency for wishful thinking that longevity can come from some simple food or a single drug that has already been approved for something else. I share that optimism, but I think we need to work on planning for the worst and hoping for the best. And we have the tools to do it now – suddenly, and it has really been an exponential experience, there is progress in making both analytic and synthetic biology tools.

An operating system is a good metaphor – you really have to deal with every aspect. It does you little good to have the part of the operating system that handles disk drives, if you don’t have the one that handles memory and the keyboard and all the rest. So, with the age-related diseases, if you get one pathway or two or even half of them, it’s quite likely that will only buy you a few years – and we’ve already bought maybe half a lifetime over the last century or so, by working on infectious diseases so well and a few other aspects of it. But to really get it, I think now we’re talking about almost turning ourselves into a different species – like the difference between a mouse and a bowhead whale is the difference between living two years and living to two hundred. And it’s not because of what they’re eating. or how much exercise they’re getting, it’s a fundamental operating system difference.

Gain deeper insights from George Church on subjects like polypharmacy for increasing longevity, genome editing and more HERE.

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