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.

Darwin didn’t walk around the Galapagos and come up with the theory of evolution. He was exploring, collecting, making observations. It wasn’t until he got back and went through the samples that he noticed the...

Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone’s information is out there, it’s part of the collective.

It turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA – 30 to 50 letters in length – and it’s a...

I hope I’ll be remembered for my scientific contribution to understanding life and human life.

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...

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.

[That’s what Rockville, Md.-based Celera, a company that sets ambitious goals often unlikely to yield big financial returns in the short run, has set out to do.] This has been in the works for a...

I’ve gotten some pretty nice awards. I’m having trouble finding places to put them all.

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.

I see, in the future, bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use.

Synthetic biology can help address key challenges facing the planet and its population. Research in synthetic biology may lead to new things such as programmed cells that self-assemble at the sites of disease to repair...

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...

It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we’re providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on...

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

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