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.

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.