For some people, it's best for their mental health to know they have the gene for Huntington's and some time in the future they'll have a problem. But to other people, it would be a disaster.
— Leroy Hood
I already get 10 job offers a year, which is more than I can handle anyway.
The wellness and prevention market will outgrow the health care market.
Don't listen to the prevailing majority points of view. If you have new ideas, push them.
Don't underestimate the power of your vision to change the world. Whether that world is your office, your community, an industry or a global movement, you need to have a core belief that what you contribute can fundamentally change the paradigm or way of thinking about problems.
I think the real problem is it's easy to persuade young kids of particular kinds of ideas, because they are flexible.
I didn't want my genome to be sequenced by any of the companies that were out there doing the partial sequences just from the point of view of commercialisation.
If you know the mother's genome and the father's genome, and you see that the children have some genes that neither parent has, then you know that difference is either a mutation or a processing error.
Breast cancer isn't one disease - it's probably four or five different types, and without knowing what type a person has, you can't optimize treatment for them.
Anybody that thought the genome was going to directly provide drugs was a fool. Biological networks are not simple, and making drugs to affect them won't be simple.
The Human Genome Project has given us a genetic parts list.
Almost never does a single company have excellence in a multiplicity of disciplines.
Genes are natural resources.
What you need to learn how to do is analyze situations and do differential diagnoses and understand the principle and the concepts rather than learn all the details, and medical school doesn't begin to do that.
Cloning interferon was not something I wanted to get into.
If you go to the FDA with a drug that's only meant to treat 50 people, and it's a 95 percent cure rate, you'll get your drug approved.
Many nonprofits rely on grants alone.
In the late 1970s, when I was a professor at Caltech, I pioneered four instruments for analyzing genes and proteins that revolutionized modern biology - and one of these, the automated DNA sequencer, enabled the Human Genome Project.
We are evolutionary descendents of this marvellous panoply of life. And what that says unequivocally is we have an utter total obligation to make sure we have an environment that not only is good for us but is good for all living organisms.
I have good genes, and I also do lots of exercises.
Medicine will be personalized and preventive: Your genome might predict that you have an 80 percent chance of breast cancer by the time you are 50, but if you take a preventive drug starting when you are 40, the chance will drop to 2 percent.
The systems approach to biology will be the dominant theme in medicine.
Life is a process of evolution.
Your genome sequence will become a vital part of your medical record, thereby providing critical information about how to optimize your wellness.
To manipulate the immune system, you need to find the key bottlenecks that govern the system. The T-cell is an absolute bottleneck.
What is unique about humans is their individuality.
All of the details that most of us memorize in medical school - you don't have to learn those things. They're going to be in your computer.
In the end, what counts is what you do.
If you look at healthcare today, it's all about disease. It's not about understanding wellness at all.
Changing the world is not easy, but its pursuit will change you profoundly.
My fundamental philosophy is that you owe it to society to transfer to them any knowledge you have that might be useful.
My own view about knowledge is we're always better to have knowledge.
Each form of Alzheimer's disease should perturb different brain networks and so influence the concentration of different proteins that can be measured in the blood.
If you just focus on the smallest details, you never get the big picture right.
The major thing is to view biology as an information science.
If a startup stays in Microsoft, it does not have a chance, because all it tries to do goes against what Microsoft is about.
Data-intensive graph problems abound in the Life Science drug discovery and development process.
We don't argue if drug companies create drugs that can cure humans and charge lots of money for them, even though we all have these diseases. It will be pretty hard to make a different argument for genes.
An important finding is that by determining the genome sequences of an entire family, one can identify many DNA sequencing errors and thus greatly increase the accuracy of the data. This will ultimately help us understand the role of genetic variations in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease.
