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George Church
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,[…]
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Within the year, Church says, people will have affordable access to their genetic information.

Question: Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic about the way the world is headed?

Transcript:Well I’d like to think that I’m realistic which means that the optimism is only justified if a few people take very strong action, sometimes putting themselves or their careers at risk. And then you will see this positive feedback loop where more people get inspired by this, and I mentioned some of the people that have inspired me, that have taken their family’s disease and become healthcare activists. If we have a few activists, it doesn’t have to be everybody, but everybody should join with them in doing their little part. So I think that would lead to optimism, but I’m not going to be blindly optimist. We need to have activists and people who get inspired by activists.

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