Cells will die in minutes to days if they lack their genetic information system. They will not evolve, they will not replicate, and they will not live.
A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.
There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA.
Sailing is a big outlet for me.
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 differences among them and put them in context.
Traditional autobiography has generally had a poor press. The novelist Daphne du Maurier condemned all examples of this literary form as self-indulgent. Others have quipped that autobiography reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.
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.
'Bloomberg's, you know, for people who don't use the service, provides through the Internet - through specialized computers - information about the financial world. It's a very large data base. I think they have on the order of a billion dollars or more a year in revenue.
We can create new food substances.
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.
Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.
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 damage.
I think I've achieved some good things; doing the first genome in history - my team on that was phenomenal and all the things they pulled together; writing the first genome with a synthetic cell; my teams at the Venter Institute, Human Longevity, and before that Celera.
Sometime in the future, I am a hundred percent certain scientists will sit down at a computer terminal, design what they want the organism to do, and build it.
The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.
As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.
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.
Part of the problem with the discovery of the so-called breast-cancer genes was that physicians wrongly told women that had the genetic changes associated with the genes that they had a 99% chance of getting breast cancer. Turns out all women that have these genetic changes don't get breast cancer.