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.
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.
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’s quite comforting to me as an individualist that we’re not very close to being clones of one other.
Sailing is a big outlet for me.
It appears that the human genome does indeed contain deserts, or large, gene-poor regions.
I see, in the future, bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use.
Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our planet.
I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.
Every single cancer is a genetic disease. Not necessarily inherited from your parents, but it’s genetic changes which cause cancer. So as we sequence the genomes of tumours and compare those to the sequence of patients, we’re getting down to the fundamental basis of each individual person’s cancer.
That’s the nice thing about the field of science – the test of time sorts out the truth.
My early years were hardly a model of focus, discipline, and direction. No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries. No one could have predicted the arc of my career.
The fact that I have a risk genetically for Alzheimer’s and blindness is not great news. But the reality is that any one of us will have dozens of these risks, and what we have to learn is how to deal with them.
The only ‘afterlife’ is what other people remember of you.
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.
In the past, geneticists have looked at so-called disease genes, but a lot of people have changes in their genes and don’t get these diseases. There have to be other parts of physiology and genetics that compensate.
Space X’s Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars with modules where earthlings can live. My teleporting technology is the number one way those individuals will get new information, new treatments of diseases that will occur on the planet, and new food sources.
We’re a country of laws and rules, and the Supreme Court has ruled that life forms are patentable entities.
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.
You can imagine: 99 percent of your experiments fail for one reason or another.
San Francisco is one of my favorite cities on the planet.
I spent 10 years trying to find one gene.
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.
A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.
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.
It’s very expensive to treat chronic diseases.
Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply.
I thought we’d just sequence the genome once and that would be sufficient for most things in people’s lifetimes. Now we’re seeing how changeable and adaptable it is, which is why we’re surviving and evolving as a species.
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.
There’s a constant debate over nature or nurture – they’re inseparable.
Pages: 1 2
