'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.

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.