George Church - Bryant McGill

# George Church **Domain:** Genetics / Synthetic Biology / Genome Engineering **Doc Type:** Person Node **Maturity:** Developing **Related:** [[Synthetic Biology]], [[Synthetic Biology|programmable biology]], [[Team Leela]], [[Recommended Institutions and Signals]] **Collection:** [[collections/Neurotech|Neurotech]] **Canonical source articles:** [[articles/The Organic-Synthetic Brain Atlas|The Organic-Synthetic Brain Atlas]] · [[articles/Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer|Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer]] --- ## Definition **George Church** is a geneticist and bioengineer whose work spans genome sequencing, genome engineering, synthetic biology and the development of technologies for reading and rewriting biological systems. ## Corpus Context Church sits at the biological side of the machine-intelligence continuum: computation does not merely model life but increasingly participates in its redesign. This creates direct interfaces with [[Post-Biological Personhood]], enhancement and biological governance. ## Team Leela Context He appears in [[Team Leela]] as an intellectual and institutional intersection, not as a member of an official group. ## Relationships - **PRISM collaboration:** the [[wiki/PRISM (E11 Bio)|PRISM]] preprint lists Church in conceptualization, resources, and funding acquisition. - **Method lineage:** [[wiki/FISSEQ|FISSEQ]] is part of the sequencing-in-tissue ancestry relevant to multiplexed molecular imaging; similarity of technique is not organizational identity. - **Researcher relationship:** [[wiki/Kathleen G. C. Leeper|Kathleen G. C. Leeper]] is linked to Church's laboratory through the PRISM author affiliations. - **Collection and source routes:** [[collections/Neurotech|Neurotech]], [[articles/The Organic-Synthetic Brain Atlas|The Organic-Synthetic Brain Atlas]], and [[articles/Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer|Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer]]. - **Enhancement interview:** [CBS News's *60 Minutes* report (2019)](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/george-church-the-complicated-ethics-of-genetic-engineering-60-minutes-2019-12-08/) quotes his condition of simultaneous access and reports his concerns about oversight and reversibility; [[wiki/Self-Directed Evolution|Self-Directed Evolution]] is the distinct ethical route. - **Edge source route:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] connects this topic to exact Annual Question passages promoted into the Simple Reminders archive. ## Backlinks [[Recommended Institutions and Signals]] · [[Team Leela]] ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts  > "I'm still looking for a computer that is intelligent, that knows more than I know. And it's getting closer." > **— George M. Church**, *2004, Harvard Magazine profile/interview* [[reminders/Machine Succession/The Computer Smarter Than Us Is Getting Closer by George M. Church|The Computer Smarter Than Us Is Getting Closer by George M. Church]]  > "We can back-up petabytes of sili-brains perfectly in seconds, but transfer of information between carbo-brains takes decades and the similarity between the copies is barely recognizable. Some speculate that we could translate from carbo to sili, and even get the sili version to behave like the original. However, such a task requires much deeper understanding than merely making a copy." > **— George Church**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Mind Upload/Copying a Brain Requires More Than Copying Its Information by George Church|Copying a Brain Requires More Than Copying Its Information by George Church]] > “How many of us noticed the minor milestone when the SAT tests first permitted calculators? How many of us have participated in conversations semi-discreetly augmented by Google or text messaging? Even without invoking artificial intelligence, how far are we from commonplace augmentation of our decision-making the way we have augmented our math, memory, and muscles?” > **— George Church**, *2011, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?”* [[reminders/AI Control/Human Decision-making Is Already Being Augmented by George Church|Human Decision-making Is Already Being Augmented by George Church]] > “Our ability to prioritize and process the news is in an autocatalytic, positive feedback loop in which we extend our brain both biologically and electronically. Surgery could extend our brain capacity from 1.2 kg to 50 kg (routine head loads of the Sherpas of Nepal). The rate of growth of neural systems could be as fast as the doubling time of human cells (about one day) with differentiation from generic stem cells to complex neural nets recently engineered to occur in four days.” > **— George Church**, *2016, Edge Annual Question, “What Do You Consider The Most Interesting Recent [Scientific] News? What Makes It Important?”* [[reminders/Cybernetics/Nootropic Neural News by George Church|Nootropic Neural News by George Church]] > “What will we do as an encore once we manage to develop technological solutions to infection, aging, poverty, asteroids, and heat death of the universe?” > **— George Church**, *2018, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS THE LAST QUESTION?”* [[reminders/Digital Afterlife/What Comes After We Solve Aging Poverty Asteroids and Heat Death by George Church|What Comes After We Solve Aging Poverty Asteroids and Heat Death by George Church]] > “We’re not necessarily opposed to enhancement if everybody gets access to it simultaneously.” > **— George Church**, *60 Minutes interview, 2019* [[reminders/Evolution/Genetic Enhancement Must Be Equally Accessible by George Church|Genetic Enhancement Must Be Equally Accessible by George Church]] ## Sources / Provenance - [Harvard — George Church](https://hsph.harvard.edu/ala/faculty/george-church/) - [CBS News, “George Church: The complicated ethics of genetic engineering” (2019)](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/george-church-the-complicated-ethics-of-genetic-engineering-60-minutes-2019-12-08/) — quoted equal-access condition and oversight context. ## STEVE Routing [[articles/STEVE|STEVE]] places this entry within the article’s scientific, intellectual, or institutional topology. The article documents that connection; formal membership in [[Team Leela]], shared intent, and coordinated program activity remain unverified. [[articles/STEVE|STEVE]] · [[Team Leela]] · [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism]] · [[articles/The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley|The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley]] · [[articles/The Hawking Continuity|The Hawking Continuity]] · [[collections/Consciousness Continuity|Consciousness Continuity]]