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

In the past, geneticists have looked at so-called disease genes, but a lot of people have changes in their genes and don't get these diseases. There have to be other parts of physiology and genetics that compensate.

The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome.

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

There's a constant debate over nature or nurture - they're inseparable.

I naively thought that we could have a molecular definition for life, come up with a set of genes that would minimally define life. Nature just refuses to be so easily quantified.

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.

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

Early on, when you're working in a new area of science, you have to think about all the pitfalls and things that could lead you to believe that you had done something when you hadn't, and, even worse, leading others to believe it.

Mathematicians have been hiding and writing messages in the genetic code for a long time, but it's clear they were mathematicians and not biologists because, if you write long messages with the code that the mathematicians developed, it would more than likely lead to new proteins being synthesized with unknown functions.

There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA.

The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.

In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.

The photosynthesis we see with plants is not very efficient. Algaes are more efficient.

It's quite comforting to me as an individualist that we're not very close to being clones of one other.

Transposons are just small pieces of DNA that randomly insert in the genetic code. And if they insert in the middle of the gene, they disrupt its function.

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

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

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.

Is my science of a level consistent with other people who have gotten the Nobel? Yes.

Life was so cheap in Vietnam. That is where my sense of urgency comes from.

My genetic autobiography can be found throughout my body.

The gene 'klotho' was named after the Greek Fate purported to spin the thread of life, because it contributes to longevity.

It appears that the human genome does indeed contain deserts, or large, gene-poor regions.

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.

We know virtually all of the genes known to mammals. We do not know all of the combinations.

Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply.

We have 100 genes or so, which we know we can't knock out without killing the cell, that are of unknown structure.

I spent 10 years trying to find one gene.

There have been lots of stories written about all the hype over getting the genome done and the letdown of not discovering lots of cures right after.

If you have lung cancer, the most important thing you can know is your genetic code.

For each gene in your genome, you quite often get a different version of that gene from your father and a different version from your mother. We need to study these relationships across a very large number of people.

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.

Human lifespan used to be 30 years, 25 years. But there's no basic, fundamental reason why it has to be short.

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

I am confident that life once thrived on Mars and may well still exist there today.

The day is not far off when we will be able to send a robotically controlled genome-sequencing unit in a probe to other planets to read the DNA sequence of any alien microbe life that may be there.

My greatest fear is not the abuse of technology but that we will not use it at all.

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

Even with seemingly simple things like eye color, you can't tell from my genetic code whether I have blue eyes or not. So it's naive to think that complex human behaviors, like risk-seeking, are driven by changes in one or two genes.

It's very expensive to treat chronic diseases.

Preventative medicine has to be the direction we go in. For example, if colon cancer is detected early - because a person knew he had a genetic risk and was having frequent exams - the surgery is relatively inexpensive and average survival is far greater than 10 years.

If there is a race, it is one to bring the benefits of genomes to human therapeutics. We all want to get there. We all want people to have much more meaningful and productive lives as they age.

It takes 10 kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef, 15 liters of water to get one kilogram of beef, and those cows produce a lot of methane. Why not get rid of the cows?

The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time.

There's a lot of what I call 'bio-babble' and hype out there from a lot of bioenergy companies.

Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our planet.

When most people talk about biofuels, they talk about using oils or grease from plants.

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

We're a country of laws and rules, and the Supreme Court has ruled that life forms are patentable entities.