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" The chemistry from compounds in the environment is orders of magnitude more complex than our best chemists can produce. "

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" When I started my Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, I was told that it would be difficult to make a new discovery in biology because it was all known. It all seems so absurd now. "

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

" Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it's not a disease itself. "

" 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 nasty little thing called the Vietnam War. As a result, I got drafted. "

" Fred Sanger was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. "

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" Accuracy in the genetic field will be essential. Errors in testing could be disastrous. "

" The rich agricultural nations are the ones that can adapt to the new biotechnologies. "

" One of the challenges with a government health system, like in the UK, with all of this data, is that you have a government making decisions on which treatments they'll pay for and which ones they won't. That's a dangerous, dangerous, place to get into society. "

" We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it. "

" 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 social evolution. "

" As a scientist, I clearly see the potential for harnessing the power of nature. "

" Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our planet. "

" We can now diagnose diseases that haven't even manifested in the patient, and may not until the fifth decade of life - if at all. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are. "

" It's very expensive to treat chronic diseases. "

" I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry. "

" We all evolved out of the same three or four groups in Africa, as black Africans. "

" 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. "

" I think from my experience in war and life and science, it all has made me believe that we have one life on this planet. "

" I am not sure our brains and our psychologies are ready for immortality. "

" People think genes are an absolute cause of traits. But the notion that the genome is the blueprint for humanity is a very bad metaphor. If you think we're hard-wired and deterministic, there should indeed be a lot more genes. "

" 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 making sense of the instructions in my genome, well, that's another question. "

" There are still so many questions to answer about the workings of the human body and, most mysterious of all, it is influenced by our state of mind. "

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

" You can imagine: 99 percent of your experiments fail for one reason or another. "

" Once we all have our genomes, some of these extremely rare diseases are going to be totally predictable. "

" I don't see any absolute biological limit on human age. "