George Church: The Future without Limit

June 3, 2014

(National Geographic) – We know all this—and much more, including the results of his brain scans, sleep studies, and the sequencing of his DNA—because Church believes that the benefits of sharing such personal data vastly outweigh privacy concerns. The possibility that someone might exploit the data to steal his identity or carry out some other mischief worries him far less than the idea that by withholding such information, he might be delaying the onward march of science. That’s why in 2005 he launched the Personal Genome Project, with the goal of sequencing and sharing the DNA of 100,000 volunteers.