Ahmed Zewail Quotes

The laws of physics should allow us to arrange things molecule by molecule and even atom by atom, and at some point it was inevitable that we would develop a technology that would let us do this.

I can see no practical application of molecular biology to human affairs... DNA is a tangled mass of linear molecules in which the informational content is quite inaccessible.

The really big difference is that what you make with a molecular machine can be completely precise, down to the tiniest degree of detail that can exist in the world.

Nanotechnology is an idea that most people simply didn't believe.

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.

It's possible that we could change a human gene and double our life span. I don't know if that's true, but we can't rule that out.

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.

New technologies are often met with skepticism. But if the world is to continue the remarkable progress of the past few decades, it is vital that scientists, subject to safety and ethics guidelines, be encouraged to continue taking advantage of such promising tools as CRISPR.

In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for work done on a molecule called green fluorescent protein that was isolated from the bioluminescent chemistry of a jellyfish, and it's been equated to the invention of the microscope in terms of the impact that it has had on cell biology and genetic engineering.

When something like personal genomics or synthetic biology suddenly appears - it seems to suddenly appear - we might have been working on it for 30 years, but it seems to come out of nowhere. Then you need strategies for engaging a lot of people and thinking about where it will be going in the next few months or few years.

As technology and science advances, I think the ability to alter yourself should be embraced.

I wanted to rewrite the code of life, to make new molecular machines that would solve human problems.

Using the power of protein engineering and evolution, we can convince enzymes to take what they do poorly and do it really well.

In the test tube, I can make any DNA I want, recombining it from monkeys, worms, anywhere. So I can explore new rules of breeding with molecules.

If I were 21 years old, I would go into biotechnology or genetic engineering.

Scientists need to invent a way to make DNA work like in cartoons.

What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?

Genetic engineering is a result of science advancement, so I don't think that in itself is bad.

I'm always very excited about trying to do something on next-generation biotechnology and life sciences because I think if we can cure cancer or dementia, we can really make the future a lot better and I think these things are eminently doable.

Biohackers want to tinker; do fun science; and, in the process, accelerate the pace of biotech innovation.

My feeling is that we can genetically encode almost any kind of chemistry. We just have to learn how to do that.

We're seeing a move toward making things that either chemistry cannot make or can't make efficiently but biology does.

Our world is built on biology and once we begin to understand it, it then becomes a technology.