Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.

San Francisco is one of my favorite cities on the planet.

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've had a very unusual background in science - not the usual route of planning on being a scientist from age 3. I think my story shows that success is more about personal motivation and determination than it is about where you were born or what your economic status was.

One important part of scientific training is that scientists learn the boundaries, the safety issues, how to properly deal with and dispose of chemicals and reagents.

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.

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.

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.

That's the nice thing about the field of science - the test of time sorts out the truth.

The leading edge of the best science in the world is being driven by private money, and investment money because of the scarcity of government money to do this. It's not only by far the best and most advanced science, we're driving the equation at Human Longevity that everyone else is beginning to follow as well.

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.

Our genomes are evolving and changing every single day.

The interpretation of medicine today is 'do your clinical values fall within a normal range?' Everything in the globe right now is in the law of averages, which mean absolutely nothing to individuals.

Genomics are about individuals. It's about what's specific to you, not your siblings, not your parents - each of us is totally unique. We will only see that uniqueness by drilling down to the genetic code.

People think that Celera's trying to patent the whole human genome because it's been used as - I guess people in Washington learn how to do political attacks, and so it gets used as a political weapon, not as a factual one.

I wrote an editorial piece in 'Science' about the nightly data release and how I thought it was bad for science as a field, I think a few years before Celera was formed.

'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.

The same oil that gets burned as fuel is also the entire basis for the petrochemical industries, so our clothing, our plastics and our pharmaceuticals all come from oil and its derivatives.

Right now, oil is being isolated around the globe, and there is a major effort in shipping, trucking and otherwise transporting that oil around to a very finite number of refineries. Biology allows us to make these same fuels in a much more distributed fashion.

Companies, cities, and potentially even individuals could have a small refinery to make their own fuel.

You can't have life without the genetic code.

We can create new food substances.

We can create new ways to create clean water.

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

My early years were hardly a model of focus, discipline, and direction. No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries. No one could have predicted the arc of my career.

I willed myself through a junior college to a university and, ultimately, a Ph.D.

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

Traditional ways of distinguishing populations are irrelevant in terms of genetic code.

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

There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people's lives.

Mitochondrial DNA is in higher concentration, lasts longer, and can be extracted from bones.

Race has no genetic or scientific basis.

Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.

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

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.