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George Church is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a professor of health sciences and technology at Harvard and MIT. In 1984, Church, along with Walter Gilbert,[…]

Extremes make for good press.

Question: Do you have a personal philosophy?

Transcript: 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 think that a lot of what we have are a set of accidents. And there is design in the world, and there will be lots of design going forward. And it’s an opportunity to embrace both the natural and the synthetic. There’s a lot of what’s natural is painful, and a lot of what’s synthetic is not completely thought out, but offers an alternative. My worldview is that dynamic between design and past and future. The parts of nature that we like, and the parts of nature which, for one reason or another, because of say population explosion is still natural, but it’s ________. It’s pathological from our human viewpoint, and we need to embrace ecology in a very intelligent way. And this requires that our politicians and regular folks know a great deal more about ecology in their world and their personal diversity than they currently know.


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