spiegel | SPIEGEL: Germans are traditionally scared of genetically modified organisms.
Church: But don't forget: The ones we are talking about won't be
farm GMOs. These will be in containers, and so if there's a careful
planning process, I would predict that Germany would be as good as any
country at doing this.
SPIEGEL: There has been a lot of fierce public opposition to
genetic engineering in Germany. How do you experience this? Do you find
it annoying?
Church: Quite to the contrary. I personally think it has been
fruitful. And I think there are relatively few examples in which such a
debate has slowed down technology. I think we should be quite cautious,
but that doesn't mean that we should put moratoriums on new
technologies. It means licensing, surveillance, doing tests. And we
actually must make sure the public is educated about them. It would be
great if all the politicians in the world were as technologically savvy
as the average citizen is politically savvy.
SPIEGEL: Acceptance is highest for such technology when it is first applied in the medical industry ...
Church: … yes, and the potential of synthetic life is
particularly large in pharmaceuticals. The days of classic, small
molecule drugs may be numbered. Actually, it is a miracle that they work
in the first place. They kind of dose your whole body. They cross-react
with other molecules. Now, we are getting better and better at
programming cells. So I think cell therapies are going to be the next
big thing. If you engineer genomes and cells, you have an incredible
amount of sophistication. If you take AIDS virus as an example ...
SPIEGEL: ... a disease you also want to beat with cell therapy?
Church: Yes. All you have to do is take your blood cell
precursors out of your body, reengineer them using gene therapy to knock
out both copies of your CCR5 gene, which is the AIDS receptor, and then
put them back in your body. Then you can't get AIDS any more, because
the virus can't enter your cells.
SPIEGEL: Are we correct in assuming you wouldn't hesitate to use
germ cell therapy, as well, if you could improve humans genetically in
this way?
Church: Well, there are stem cell therapies already. There are
hematopoietic stem cell transplants that are widely practiced, and skin
stem cell transplants. Once you have enough experience with these
techniques you can start talking about human cloning. One of the things
to do is to engineer our cells so that they have a lower probability of
cancer. And then once we have a lower probability of cancer, you can
crank up their self-renewal properties, so that they have a lower
probability of senescence. We have people who live to be 120 years old.
What if we could all live 120 years? That might be considered desirable.
SPIEGEL: But you haven't got any idea which genes to change in order to achieve that goal.
Church: In order to find out, we are now involved in sequencing
as many people as possible who have lived for over 110 years. There are
only 60 of those people in the world that we know of.
SPIEGEL: Do you have any results already?
Church: It's too early to say. But we collected the DNA of about 20 of them, and the analysis is just beginning.
SPIEGEL: You expect them all to have the same mutation that guarantees longevity?
Church: That is one possibility. The other possibility is that they each have their own little advantage over everybody else.
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