HoldsUp

George Church

Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

George Church, PhD, is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and of health sciences and technology at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work centers on genetics, gene editing technology, and synthetic biology, and he contributed to the Human Genome Project. His published research spans topics including genome editing design, DNA synthesis, spatial transcriptomics, synthetic cellular circuits, genetic recoding, and adult genomic sequencing.

53 claims checked on air: 3 context 3 overstated 38 supported 9 unverified

What they said on air - context

2 citing their own research

0:38:27needs contexthighGeorge Church, PhD: Rewriting Genomes to Eradicate Disease a

Oliver Smithies and Mario Capecchi received the Nobel Prize for homologous recombination decades before Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won for CRISPR.

"notably homologous recombination, which Smithies and Capecchi got the Nobel Prize for decades before Jennifer and Emmanuelle." (said at 0:38:27)

Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies (along with Sir Martin J. Evans) were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007 for their development of gene targeting in embryonic stem cells using homologous recombination. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for the development of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing. While the foundational discoveries of homologous recombination in mammalian cells took place in the 1980s (several decades prior to Doudna and Charpentier's 2012 CRISPR work), the Nobel Prizes themselves were awarded 13 years apart (2007 vs. 2020), rather than multiple decades apart.

1:06:30needs contextvery lowGeorge Church, PhD: Rewriting Genomes to Eradicate Disease a

Follistatin and TERT gene therapy treatments produced a statistically significant longevity extension in rodents.

"In the case of the follistatin and TERT treatments, those did show a pretty significant, very significant longevity effect on the rodents." (said at 1:06:30)

The speaker refers to rodent gene therapy studies testing telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) and follistatin (FST). A 2022 study in PNAS reported that mouse cytomegalovirus vectors delivering TERT or follistatin extended median lifespan in mice by 41.4% and 32.5%, respectively; however, that publication was retracted in 2025. An earlier 2012 study demonstrated that adeno-associated virus (AAV)-mediated TERT gene therapy extended median lifespan by 13% to 24% in adult and old mice. Because the key study evaluating follistatin alongside TERT was retracted, and remaining evidence is limited strictly to rodent models, the evidence for these treatments is of very low certainty and requires qualification.

1:46:36needs contextmoderateGeorge Church, PhD: Rewriting Genomes to Eradicate Disease a

The human Lyme disease vaccine was withdrawn from the market following controversy associated with Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent claims linking vaccines to autism.

"There also is, you know, there is a pretty good Lyme vaccine that was blocked for no particularly great reason. It was, uh, it happened to bad timing that happened around the same time as the fake data on, uh, uh, vaccines causing autism. Wakefield, I think, was this scientist's name who who faked the data, and later was when that was revealed, but the damage was already done. People kept repeating it as if for a fact for many years after it was shown to be false. Um, and so they pulled the the, um, Lyme disease vaccine off." (said at 1:46:36)

The human Lyme disease vaccine (LYMErix, an OspA-based vaccine) was approved by the FDA in 1998 and voluntarily withdrawn by manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline in 2002 due to plummeting consumer demand, media sensationalism, and class-action lawsuits. While this coincided temporally with the broader surge in anti-vaccine sentiment following Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 paper on the MMR vaccine and autism, the specific controversy that doomed LYMErix centered on unproven allegations that the vaccine triggered autoimmune arthritis via molecular mimicry, not autism. Subsequent post-marketing surveillance and FDA reviews found no statistically significant increase in arthritis among vaccine recipients compared to unvaccinated controls, confirming the vaccine was safe and effective, but public confidence had collapsed.

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