Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply.
— Craig Venter
It appears that the human genome does indeed contain deserts, or large, gene-poor regions.
My genetic autobiography can be found throughout my body.
Sometime in the future, I am a hundred percent certain scientists will sit down at a computer terminal, design what they want the organism to do, and build it.
The chemistry from compounds in the environment is orders of magnitude more complex than our best chemists can produce.
The photosynthesis we see with plants is not very efficient. Algaes are more efficient.
We have trouble feeding, providing fresh, clean water, medicines, fuel for the six and a half billion. It's going to be a stretch to do it for nine.
Early on, when you're working in a new area of science, you have to think about all the pitfalls and things that could lead you to believe that you had done something when you hadn't, and, even worse, leading others to believe it.
Accuracy in the genetic field will be essential. Errors in testing could be disastrous.
I naively thought that we could have a molecular definition for life, come up with a set of genes that would minimally define life. Nature just refuses to be so easily quantified.
The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome.
I am not sure our brains and our psychologies are ready for immortality.
Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.
There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people's lives.
Traditional ways of distinguishing populations are irrelevant in terms of genetic code.
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.
You can imagine: 99 percent of your experiments fail for one reason or another.
We know virtually all of the genes known to mammals. We do not know all of the combinations.
I have a blend of klotho gene variants that have been linked with a lower risk for coronary artery disease and stroke and an advantage in longevity.
Life was so cheap in Vietnam. That is where my sense of urgency comes from.
Ethanol's not an ideal fuel.
Transposons are just small pieces of DNA that randomly insert in the genetic code. And if they insert in the middle of the gene, they disrupt its function.
In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.
There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA.
Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another.
Even though people pretend that medical records are privileged information, anyone can already get their hands on them.
There's a constant debate over nature or nurture - they're inseparable.
In the past, geneticists have looked at so-called disease genes, but a lot of people have changes in their genes and don't get these diseases. There have to be other parts of physiology and genetics that compensate.
A lot of people spend their last decade of their lives in pain and misery combating disease.
Race has no genetic or scientific basis.
We all evolved out of the same three or four groups in Africa, as black Africans.
Fred Sanger was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.
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 can create new ways to create clean water.
When I started my Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, I was told that it would be difficult to make a new discovery in biology because it was all known. It all seems so absurd now.
The gene 'klotho' was named after the Greek Fate purported to spin the thread of life, because it contributes to longevity.
Is my science of a level consistent with other people who have gotten the Nobel? Yes.
I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry.
It's quite comforting to me as an individualist that we're not very close to being clones of one other.
The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.
Mathematicians have been hiding and writing messages in the genetic code for a long time, but it's clear they were mathematicians and not biologists because, if you write long messages with the code that the mathematicians developed, it would more than likely lead to new proteins being synthesized with unknown functions.
We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.
We can now diagnose diseases that haven't even manifested in the patient, and may not until the fifth decade of life - if at all.
As a scientist, I clearly see the potential for harnessing the power of nature.
People think genes are an absolute cause of traits. But the notion that the genome is the blueprint for humanity is a very bad metaphor. If you think we're hard-wired and deterministic, there should indeed be a lot more genes.
I don't see any absolute biological limit on human age.
Mitochondrial DNA is in higher concentration, lasts longer, and can be extracted from bones.
You cannot look at a person's genes and say with any accuracy whether they are from one racial group or another.
I willed myself through a junior college to a university and, ultimately, a Ph.D.
Traditional autobiography has generally had a poor press. The novelist Daphne du Maurier condemned all examples of this literary form as self-indulgent. Others have quipped that autobiography reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.
