I suppose if there’s a set of genes I have, it’s detesting authority.

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...

I somewhat joke that I know an awful lot because I learn from my mistakes. I just make a lot of mistakes. It’s OK to fail in science just as long as you have the...

All these names are bigger-than-life names, … When you see their actual letters and their notebooks, it puts a real stamp of humanity on these people.

A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.

My generation was raised on ‘Dick Tracy’ cartoons, where he could get a thousand bullet holes in him like Swiss cheese and keep on going. We have a hundred trillion cells, and you would have...

I was a horrible student. I really hated school.

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...

I think I’m a survivor. I could have suffered at least 100 professional deaths. I could come up with a list of the 100 times I’ve come closest to death, from having pneumonia as a...

the most important scientific effort that humankind has ever mounted.

We can do genetics. We can do experiments on fruit flies. We can do experiments on yeast. It’s not so easy to do experiments on humans. So, in fact, it helps us, to interpret our...

Now that we can read and write the genetic code, put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life, it will be possible to speed up biological evolution to the pace of...

Life is a DNA software system.

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 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...

If anything, we’ve learned that we don’t think this data’s going to be as deterministic as was previously thought, … There is even more need for this legislation until science catches up with our collective...

We have 200 trillion cells, and the outcome of each of them is almost 100 percent genetically determined. And that’s what our experiment with the first synthetic genome proves, at least in the case of...

One of the fundamental discoveries I made about myself – early enough to make use of it – was that I am driven to seize life and to understand it. The motor that pushes me...

Nobel prizes are very special prizes, and it would be great to get one.

The trouble is the field of science, medicine, universities, biotech companies – you name it – have been so splintered, layers, sub-divided, hacked that people can spend their entire career studying one tiny little cog...

I was a surf bum wannabe. I left home at age 17 and moved to Southern California to try to take up surfing as a vocation, but this was in 1964, and there was this...

We said that once we had finished sequencing the genome we would make it available to the scientific community for free, … And we will be doing that on Monday morning at 10am.

Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.

One of the things about genetics that has become clearer as we’ve done genomes – as we’ve worked our way through the evolutionary tree, including humans – is that we’re probably much more genetic animals...

The future of society is 100% dependent on scientific advances.

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.

I’ve always been fascinated with adrenaline; it’s saved my life more than once, and it’s caused me to need it to save my life more than once. One of the most fascinating responses in human...

A good leader takes advantage of that.

Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth’s environment.

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 only ‘afterlife’ is what other people remember of you.

We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. So, people who think of...

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’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...

This has been in the works for a long time. This was something that was always obvious to do as a next step.

I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.

Sailing is a big outlet for me. It’s one of the key things I’ve been able to do by commingling science with sailing and my love of the sea. Also, I have several motorcycles, and...

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.

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.

My complaint is that there are more books and news articles than there are primary scientific papers. I am probably the biggest critic of the hypesters, because it’s dangerous when fields get overhyped.

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.

I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me.

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.

You’d need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.

When you think of all the things that are made from oil or in the chemical industry, if in the future we could find cells to replace most of those processes, the ideal way would...

People equate patents with secrecy, that secrecy is what patents were designed to overcome. That’s why the formula for Coca-Cola was never patented. They kept it as a trade secret, and they’ve outlasted patent laws...

If we were trying to make liquid transportation fuels to replace all transportation fuels in the U.S., and you try and do that from corn, it would take a facility three times the size of...

I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet.

Since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast into space in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth. Whether there is any creature out there capable of...

Creating life at the speed of light is part of a new industrial revolution. Manufacturing will shift from centralised factories to a distributed, domestic manufacturing future, thanks to the rise of 3D printer technology.