Scientist

There are still so many questions to answer about the workings of the human body and, most mysterious of all, it is influenced by our state of mind.

Knowing what your parents have gives you hints of things, but your genome is a totally unique combination of and interchange of DNA from your parents. There is no one else like you genetically.

One important part of scientific training is that scientists learn the boundaries, the safety issues, how to properly deal with and dispose of chemicals and reagents.

People want to protect the territory that they have, and they're very threatened by change. That's not true for all of scientists, but you know, fortunately, the scientific community moves forward in a conservative fashion.

'Bloomberg's, you know, for people who don't use the service, provides through the Internet - through specialized computers - information about the financial world. It's a very large data base. I think they have on the order of a billion dollars or more a year in revenue.

Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply.

My early years were hardly a model of focus, discipline, and direction. No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries. No one could have predicted the arc of my career.

We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.

Life is a DNA software system.

Mitochondrial DNA is in higher concentration, lasts longer, and can be extracted from bones.

The interpretation of medicine today is 'do your clinical values fall within a normal range?' Everything in the globe right now is in the law of averages, which mean absolutely nothing to individuals.

I wrote an editorial piece in 'Science' about the nightly data release and how I thought it was bad for science as a field, I think a few years before Celera was formed.

When you think of all the things that are made from oil or in the chemical industry, if in the future we could find cells to replace most of those processes, the ideal way would be to do it by direct design.

The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome.

A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.

A lot of people spend their last decade of their lives in pain and misery combating disease.

One of the fundamental discoveries I made about myself - early enough to make use of it - was that I am driven to seize life and to understand it. The motor that pushes me is propelled by more than scientific curiosity.

Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.

You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.

Ethanol's not an ideal fuel.