Their proposal, which was outlined Thursday in the journal Science, involves developing their own lab-made version of the entire human genetic code with the hope that their efforts may one day lead to important medical breakthroughs, according to NPR and the New York Times.

Dubbed the Human Genome Project–Write (HGP-Write) project, the goal is to synthesize the complete genome using its chemical components, and make it possible for them to function in actual human cells. Doing so will be no small task, as published reports have indicated that at least $100 million will initially need to be raised to pursue the task of creating the three billion base pairs of DNA required for a human cell to survive and function properly.

"We just had a revolution in our ability to read genomes, [and] the same thing is happening now with writing genomes," Church told NPR. "We have the ability to synthesize bacterial genomes and we can synthesize parts of human genomes. We would like to be able to scale that up so we can make larger and larger collections of genomes."