George Church on reimagining woolly mammoths and virus-proofing humans

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"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 planet: from the so-called "de-extinction" of woolly mammoths, to growing transplant-suitable organs in pigs, to virus-proofing humans.

When inspiration strikes, there seems to be little that will slow him down - even the fact that he has narcolepsy, the neurological disorder that causes sudden sleep attacks. In fact, as George tells Professor Jim Al-Khalili, some of his best ideas come in those moments between waking and sleep...

Presented by Jim Al-Khalili Produced by Lucy Taylor for BBC Studios

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:07.3	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron.
0:10.5	Evil genius.
0:11.6	He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it.
0:15.5	That's like hiding at your own funeral.
0:17.1	Yeah, a bit great gig.
0:18.6	I'm Russell Kane.
0:19.6	Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius.
0:24.1	Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius.
0:26.4	It also helps it.
0:27.4	It's a long time ago, right?
0:29.4	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
0:34.9	Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.
0:39.5	You're about to listen to the latest series of the Life Scientific. Episodes will be released weekly wherever you get your podcasts. But
0:45.9	if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes 28 days before anywhere else,
0:52.4	first on BBC Sounds.
0:55.4	Hello, what if we could bring back the woolly mammoth, not for spectacle, but to help
1:01.1	save the planet, or improve the success rate of transplant by growing human-compatible organs
1:07.0	in pigs? What if everyone in the world could have their genome sequenced as easily as
1:11.9	getting a blood test, so we could spot diseases before they even appear? These ideas might sound
1:17.9	like science fiction, but they're being made reality by today's guest, who makes a habit of finding
1:23.5	solutions to the seemingly impossible. George Church is a geneticist, molecular engineer and one of the pioneers of modern genomics.
	...

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