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1. 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.
2. Fred Sanger was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.
3. 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.
4. We can create new ways to create clean water.
5. Our genomes are evolving and changing every single day.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. How we understand our own selves and how we work with our DNA software has implications that will affect everything from vaccine development to new approaches to antibiotics, new sources of food, new sources of chemicals, even potentially new sources of energy.
9. A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.
10. The only ‘afterlife’ is what other people remember of you.
11. I was a horrible student. I really hated school.
12. Part of the problem with the discovery of the so-called breast-cancer genes was that physicians wrongly told women that had the genetic changes associated with the genes that they had a 99% chance of getting breast cancer. Turns out all women that have these genetic changes don’t get breast cancer.
13. You’d need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.
14. 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.
15. I’ve made money by just trying to do world-class science. That’s the goal that we’re setting at Celera. If we do world-class science and create new medicine paradigms, the money will more than follow at a corporate level and at a personal level.
16. I think from my experience in war and life and science, it all has made me believe that we have one life on this planet.
17. The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.
18. Even with seemingly simple things like eye color, you can’t tell from my genetic code whether I have blue eyes or not. So it’s naive to think that complex human behaviors, like risk-seeking, are driven by changes in one or two genes.
19. I turned 65 last year, and each year I get more and more interested in human health. For most people it happens around age 50, but I’ve always been a slow learner. It’s critical in terms of the cost of health care.
20. The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome.