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The Life Scientific

George Church on reimagining woolly mammoths and virus-proofing humans

Oct 28, 2025 · 28m

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"My ideas are often labelled as impossible, or useless, or both. Usually when people say that I'm on the right track." George Church is a geneticist, molecular engineer, and one of the pioneers of modern genomics. He's also someone who makes a habit of finding solutions to the seemingly impossible. Over the course of his career so far, George developed the first method for direct genomic sequencing, helped initiate the Human Genome Project, and founded the Personal Genome Project: making huge quantities of DNA data publicly available for research. Today, as a professor at Harvard Medical School and MIT, he’s working on some of the most headline-grabbing - and controversial - science on the…