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It sounds a little bit too arrogant, but I think I certainly have a working model for how I conduct my life, and it may or may not be a correct worldview.
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.
You should have personalized genomics, personalized physiology, personalized medicine, where each person's different, and each body is an integrated whole.
Each part of our genome is unique. We would not be alive if there was not a single mathematical solution for our chromosomes. We would just be scrambled goo.
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.
Anytime you see somebody keeping a secret, that's symptomatic that something's wrong with the society around them. That means there's discrimination or worse.
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.
What I really wanted was for everybody to have their genome and, ideally, everybody to share their genome, and for that, we needed to bring the price way down.
Genomics is a new idea. Like the PC, it's not obvious at first that anyone would want one. It's like, 'Hey, we've already got one genome, why do we need more?'
Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed
Natural selection must be replaced by eugenical artificial selection. This idea constitutes the sound core of eugenics, the applied science of human betterment.
Taken with the archaeological data, we can say that the old hypothesis of an invasion of people - not merely their language - from the steppe appears to be true.
How do you get things out of your head, out of your lab, and into the world? If you're not part of the economic community, there's a chance... you'll fall behind.
Someone younger at heart should replace you, and that should be you. I'm willing to. I'm willing to become younger. I try to reinvent myself every few years anyway.
Very often, as I wander through life, I'll get that old feeling that I've come back from the future, and I'm living in the past. And it's a really horrible feeling.
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.
If you get very fine, accurate, and inexpensive control over your genome, you can fundamentally change the kind of organism you are. You are extending human capacity.
Show me a highly successful person in any field that has gotten there having a weak ego. You have to believe in yourself, and you have to believe in what you're doing.
When you do cross-breeding of plants, you're doing this blind experiment where you're just mixing DNA of different types of cells and just seeing what comes out of it.
How you feel right now is about equally genetic and circumstantial, but how you will feel on average over the next ten years is fully 80 percent because of your genes.
No known human group... simply throw out its dead without any ritual or ceremony. In stark contrast, no animal practices burial of dead individuals of its own species.
I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry.
People think they're making individual decisions for themselves and their family not to get vaccinated. It's not just an individual choice - you're a hazard to society.
Everybody is looking for a naturally occurring algae that is going to be a miracle cell to save the world, and after a century of looking, people still haven't found it.
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.
The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people's lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.
Science should be the most fun job on the planet. You get to ask questions about the world around you and go out and seek the answers. Not to have fun doing that is crazy.
My laboratory and my obsession is about safety and building/engineering safety. It's not just a matter of saying we want the world to be safer; we have to create technology.
Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.
I will make the argument that we are poorly adapted to our current environment. I mean, we did not evolve to sit all day and be exposed to giant amounts of really tasty food.
If we could take one of my skin cells and turn it into an embryo-like cell and turn it back into a skin cell, it has reset almost all of the developmental indications of age.
There are a few genetic traits that make people feel sorry for you, and there are some, like narcolepsy, at which people take personal offense unless you tell them in advance.
Evolutionary game theory is a way of thinking about evolution at the phenotypic level when the fitnesses of particular phenotypes depend on their frequencies in the population.
It turns out that every person alive today can trace his or her ancestry back to Africa. Everyone's DNA tells a story of a journey from an African homeland to wherever you live.
It is in the nature of science that once a position becomes orthodox it should be suggested to criticism.... It does not follow that, because a position is orthodox, it is wrong.
Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution.
Organisms in the ocean provide over 40 percent of the oxygen we breathe, and they're the major sink for capturing all the carbon dioxide we constantly release into the atmosphere.
The Janus-like nature of innovation - its responsible use and so on - was evident at the very birth of human ingenuity, when humankind first discovered how to make fire on demand.
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.
It takes 10 kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef, 15 liters of water to get one kilogram of beef, and those cows produce a lot of methane. Why not get rid of the cows?
Our ancestors didn't need any genetic enhancements to be able to sit for twelve hours a day and eat fatty, sugary foods, but we need enhancements that handle that altered environment.
The same oil that gets burned as fuel is also the entire basis for the petrochemical industries, so our clothing, our plastics and our pharmaceuticals all come from oil and its derivatives.
The Anthropocentic Age - the first age in which humankind is the dominant species on the planet - cuts both ways: it is up to us to destroy or save the planet. We certainly have the ability.
I have faith that science is a good thing. Seriously, I'd say that I am very much in awe of nature. In fact, I think to some extent, "awe" was a word that was almost invented for scientists.
Most people don't realize it, because they're invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earth's biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass.
I think something very simple that everybody can do is they can participate in medical research as subjects. Personal genome project, for example, will take on as many subjects as we can find.
If there is a race, it is one to bring the benefits of genomes to human therapeutics. We all want to get there. We all want people to have much more meaningful and productive lives as they age.
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.
Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology.
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.