Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We're a country of laws and rules, and the Supreme Court has ruled that life forms are patentable entities.
Many of the crises we see in the 21st century, I would argue, have their roots in the dawn of the Neolithic.
I am 3.8 percent Neanderthal. One of my ancestors mated with a Neanderthal, and I am not embarrassed by that.
I don't know if the optimists or the pessimists are right. But, the optimists are going to get something done.
Human lifespan used to be 30 years, 25 years. But there's no basic, fundamental reason why it has to be short.
You cannot look at a person's genes and say with any accuracy whether they are from one racial group or another.
There's not going to be any one replacement for oil: we need to have hundreds of solutions to this global issue.
It's all too easy to dismiss the future. People confuse what's impossible today with what's impossible tomorrow.
DNA ties us all together; we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back.
Nature's stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest may also be the gentlest.
We have 100 genes or so, which we know we can't knock out without killing the cell, that are of unknown structure.
Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.
You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.
Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective.
As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.
The more we know, the better we realize that our knowledge is a little island in the midst of an ocean of ignorance.
Scientific theories tell us what is possible; myths tell us what is desirable. Both are needed to guide proper action.
The chemistry from compounds in the environment is orders of magnitude more complex than our best chemists can produce.
Even though people pretend that medical records are privileged information, anyone can already get their hands on them.
Mathematics is so much easier than words mathematics makes things clear that words merely muddle and confuse and mess up.
The gene 'klotho' was named after the Greek Fate purported to spin the thread of life, because it contributes to longevity.
Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.
We have a love affair with the idea of the 'natural,' even though we, as a species, are about as unnatural as you can imagine.
Moving forward in science is as much unwinding the distorted thinking of the past as it is putting a clearer idea on the table.
If I had a weak ego, and doubts about this, the first genome would not yet have been completed with US and UK government funding.
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.
There is a reference in Aristotle to a gnat produced by larvae engendered in the slime of vinegar. This must have been Drosophila.
I like to keep the median age in my lab low because they will indulge me in my dreams. They don't yet think things are impossible.
I would argue that we're not limited by actual DNA. You can re-create the ancient DNA by looking at the genomes of existing animals.
Letting the tundra melt is the equivalent to burning all of the forests in all of the world and their roots two and a half times over.
The rewards for biotechnology are tremendous - to solve disease, eliminate poverty, age gracefully. It sounds so much cooler than Facebook.
A scenario is, everyone takes gene therapy - not just curing rare diseases like cystic fibrosis, but diseases that everyone has, like aging.
The goal of getting your genome done is not to tell you what you will die from, but it's how to learn how to take action to prevent disease.
Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply.
People are comprised of sets of DNA from each parent. If you looked at just the DNA from your father, it wouldn't tell you who you really are.
Most drugs work on only about a third of the population, they do no damage to another third, and the final third can have negative consequences.
It is an occupational risk of biologists to claim, towards the end of their careers, that the problems which they have not solved are insoluble.
You can make pigs that are essentially much closer to being universal donors. If it works, their organs will be going into people like you and me.
At some point, someone will come up with an airtight argument as to why they should have a cloned child. At that point, cloning will be acceptable.
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.
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.
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't just live in a comfortable little suburban neighborhood and get your education from movies and television and have any perspective on life.
We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before.
There have been lots of stories written about all the hype over getting the genome done and the letdown of not discovering lots of cures right after.
If you go far enough back, your genome connects you with bacteria, butterflies, and barracuda - the great chain of being linked together through DNA.
Cells will die in minutes to days if they lack their genetic information system. They will not evolve, they will not replicate, and they will not live.
If I could change the science system, my prescription for changing the whole thing would be organising it around big goals and building teams to do it.
Most groups patent ways of using genetic discoveries as part of non-obvious diagnostic and therapeutic protocols and slightly or greatly altered genes.
The World Wide Web went from zero to millions of web pages in a few years. Many revolutions look irrelevant just before they change everything swiftly.