Words matter. These are the best Mark Walport Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When governments work well, they safeguard citizens’ health, well-being, resilience and security, and they increase prosperity. To do this, they must respond effectively to the new, the unexpected, and the game-changing.
Forensic science offers great potential, as it draws on almost every discipline and, in doing so, creates widespread opportunity for innovation.
Sharing data allows us to research, communicate, consume media, buy and sell, play games, and more. In return, businesses develop products, scientists undertake research, and governments use data to enable voting, inform policies, collect tax, and provide better public services.
The best approach to risk is to identify and manage it.
The problem of poor vision has gone unnoticed for too long – it’s astounding that 700 years after glasses were first invented, there are still 2.5 billion people across the world without access to something as simple as eye screening or a pair of glasses.
No one likes doing primate experiments, but some research can only be done on monkeys.
I’ve never been a proponent of something monolithic.
Science is not finished until it is communicated.
Like Israel, the U.K. is a democracy, and like Israel, we would never want to muzzle political voices, whatever their opinions – and that is especially true for universities.
Living in areas with a high population density does not need to be synonymous with overcrowding. Manhattan has an extremely dense population and is considered by many to be a highly desirable place to live.
We may know the chemical structure of medicinal drugs, but we frequently have a very incomplete understanding of how they work.
Science can tell us what can be done in principle, but it is then a matter for public debate as to what should be done. And ultimately, it is a role for politicians to decide the answers.
It is important to recognise that, alongside the huge benefits that artificial intelligence offers, there are potential ethical issues associated with some uses.
It is absolutely key that funding is used to support the best scientists with the best ideas.
The most dangerous infections of humans have always been those which have emerged from other species.
It’s been an enormous privilege to be the government chief scientific adviser.
Many families would like to avoid burdening future generations with inherited diseases such as haemophilia or severe developmental disorders. But most would think it wrong to edit the genes that influence the ‘normal’ range of human variation, from eye colour to intelligence or athletic ability.
Clearly, climate change is an extremely important threat to us.
We owe it to ourselves and to our policy makers to have a high standard of public debate about the future of our energy supplies.
It seems paradoxical that, as medical scientists make huge advances in discovering the mechanisms of common diseases, fewer and fewer innovative drugs are reaching the market.
We clearly have to reduce harmful energy emissions. Everyone acknowledges we simply can’t switch off fossil fuels overnight.
The Wellcome Trust will retain a level of financial flexibility which will enable us to react quickly to unexpected developments and new ideas.
As a medical student in the 1970s, I was taught that the foundations of diagnosis and treatment were to take a detailed history and to perform a comprehensive clinical examination.
When the correct tests are done, GM products are as safe as their non-GM counterparts.
David Sainsbury has been good for science and good for innovation in the U.K. He has been an outstanding science minister and shown extraordinary passion and commitment to his portfolio.
Banks and credit agencies learn continuously about the purchases we make. This is convenient and diminishes the risk of theft. It also means that banks can know more about our lifestyle than our close relatives.
There is a particular set of values commonly associated with being professional. Experience, expertise, trustworthiness, wisdom, and good judgement are all attributes aspired to by senior professional people, be they doctors, engineers, lawyers, civil servants, or the clergy.
Research must be central to healthcare if healthcare is to improve.
Distributed ledger technologies have the potential to help governments to collect taxes, deliver benefits, issue passports, record land registries, assure the supply chain of goods, and generally ensure the integrity of government records and services.
Cities are central to the shaping and delivery of national policy objectives, and in return, they are the places where social, environmental, and economic policies play out in practice.
I think publishing is a cost of research in the same way as buying a centrifuge is a cost of research.
It is a fiction to imagine that the haphazard paper chits of old are more private than the modern digital alternative. Paper records have always presented a security risk.
People go on exploration; they’re trying to find places that weren’t known before. But it is an inevitable fact of research, as is in any other form of exploration of the unknown, that some people find they go down a dead end.
Forensic techniques are enormously useful in a wide range of fields outside the criminal justice system.
A computer, by definition, cannot be held accountable for anything because there is no mechanism to hold it to account, short of turning off the electricity supply or destroying the hardware. Only humans can be accountable.
My job is to advise politicians, elected officials, and government ministries of the best way to deal with important issues, both localized, national, and the grand challenges facing humanity.
Climate change is happening, and humans are significant contributors, and that raises some really important policy questions.
As medical data has such power to deliver better understanding of disease and better patient outcomes, it is important we find the best way of sharing it.
Medical engineering is one of the areas in which the traditional ‘silo’ structures of university disciplines have not encouraged collaboration.
Of course methane is a fossil fuel, but as long as it is burned efficiently and fugitive emissions of methane gas are minimised, it is a less harmful fossil fuel than coal and oil and is an important way-station on the global journey towards low-carbon energy.
There is usually a long interval between important scientific discoveries and impact on human health.
Public trust is a vital condition for artificial intelligence to be used productively.
One of the biggest costs in the whole scientific publishing world is borne by the academic community, which is the peer review.
Scientists have argued that research is good for health, wealth, and society, and the government has trusted them on that.
We’re learning how infections are travelling around the world and, sadly, how cholera in Haiti was brought in by U.N. peacekeeping forces from south Asia.
If you look at my track record as government chief scientific advisor, I’ve always recognized that all of the sciences are important to all of research, and we need a balance.
Maximum distribution of research findings is essential to maximise their impact.
Common sense, proportionality, and judgment are the skills we must seek in those we choose to regulate our lives.
In medicine, there is always a balance between risk and benefit.
It was and has been one of the major interventions in public health, and it’s absolutely vital that people vaccinate their children.
