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...