Richard Dawkins Quotes

The important thing is that we now have the tools to sequence all kinds of animals and plants and microbes - as well as humans. It is not important that we didn't actually finish the human sequence yet.

With a hundred and seventy-eight machines to sequence the precise order of the billions of chemicals within a molecule of DNA, B.G.I. produces at least a quarter of the world's genomic data - more than Harvard University, the National Institutes of Health, or any other scientific institution.

During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project.

I was using very unconventional methods to sequence the telemetric DNA, originally.

My lab used to do gene expression and genomics, and we did a lot of sequencing samples from virus outbreaks.

Genomics is a new idea. Like the PC, it's not obvious at first that anyone would want one. It's like, 'Hey, we've already got one genome, why do we need more?'

And of course, identifying all human genes and proteins will have great medical significance.

I fell in love with the elegance and precision of genetic analysis and experimentation to answer profound biological questions.

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

Analysis of the composition of samples of DNA from a great variety of sources and by many investigators revealed the remarkable fact that the purine content always equals the pyrimidine content.

In genomics, there's a massive amount of information in which you can look for patterns and develop insights.

Our understanding of how DNA informs our health and development is advancing at an incredible pace.

I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.

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.

My family and I were some of the first people to be genotyped.

I think we're just scratching the surface. One of the most exciting aspects of 23andMe is that we're enabling you to watch a revolution unfold live during your lifetime, and I think that the decoding of the genome, in my opinion, is the most fascinating discovery of our lifetime, and you get to be part of it.

When I was 16, my dad took me to a DNA conference at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, California, and I was captivated by this way of looking at biology and by the discussions of bits of nucleic acid that could make us sick.

You've got people who are looking at DNA evidence and other evidence like that and they're ignoring it.

This seems highly likely, especially as it has been shown that in several systems mutations affecting the same amino acid are extremely near together on the genetic map.

Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code - with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It's very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.

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

With DNA, the ability to find out a lot more with a lot less has increased our ability for identification.

In the 1970s, I did a Ph.D. with Fred Sanger in Cambridge who was in the process of inventing ways to map what's inside DNA. He later won the Nobel Prize.

The first generation of biotech physically cut and pasted from one organism to another. You learned that taxol helped cure cancer, then you found the source organism and extracted the genes to make your drug. Now physical science is becoming information science.

We need 10,000 genomes, not 100, to start to understand the link between genetics, disease and wellness.