The rewards for biotechnology are tremendous - to solve disease, eliminate poverty, age gracefully. It sounds so much cooler than Facebook.

Clearly, we are a species that is well connected to other species. Whether or not we evolve from them, we are certainly very closely related to them. A series of mutations could change us into all kinds of intermediate species. Whether or not those intermediate species are provably in the past, they could easily be in our future.

My laboratory and my obsession is about safety and building/engineering safety. It's not just a matter of saying we want the world to be safer; we have to create technology.

We will have to make a decision, as we go into new environments outside of earth, whether we want to drag along with us all our pathogens. We can, or we can't - it's up to us - but I consider that part of genome engineering is how we interact with the huge part of our genome which is our microbiome.