Genetic Sequencing Quotes

I am terribly proud of-I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are DNA!

The genome could be thought of as a kind of piano with twenty-five thousand keys. In some cases, a few keys may be out of tune, which can cause the music to sound wrong. In others, if one key goes dead the music turns into a cacophony, or the whole piano self-destructs.

PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV.

I wanted to be a genetic engineer. That was my goal in college. I wanted to figure out what the codon sequence was that causes replication in a cardio myopathic virus. That was my goal.

If you sequence a cancerous tumor, you should be able to tailor the therapy according to the root cause of the cancer. But it has taken so long to do the sequencing - which also requires time to prepare the samples and interpret the deluge of data that comes out - that the patients are already undergoing therapy by the process if over.

Earlier this week ... scientists announced the completion of a task that once seemed unimaginable; and that is, the deciphering of the entire DNA sequence of the human genetic code. This amazing accomplishment is likely to affect the 21st century as profoundly as the invention of the computer or the splitting of the atom affected the 20th century. I believe that the 21st century will be the century of life sciences, and nothing makes that point more clearly than this momentous discovery. It will revolutionize medicine as we know it today.

As was predicted at the beginning of the Human Genome Project, getting the sequence will be the easy part as only technical issues are involved. The hard part will be finding out what it means, because this poses intellectual problems of how to understand the participation of the genes in the functions of living cells.

With Halcyon's technology, the pool of genetic information will grow by orders of magnitude in the course of months, offering the first real chance at cures for cancer and other previously intractable diseases.

Accuracy in the genetic field will be essential. Errors in testing could be disastrous.

A lot of environmental and biological science depends on technology to progress. Partly I'm talking about massive server farms that help people crunch genetic data - or atmospheric data. But I also mean the scientific collaborations that the Internet makes possible, where scientists in India and Africa can work with people in Europe and the Americas to come up with solutions to what are, after all, global problems.

The inability to trace DNA to actual diseases has serious consequences. As does the opposite problem - not being able to trace diseases back to DNA.

Joseph Mandell and I began by attempting to make chromatography of DNA work.

Genome-based treatment, based on wider and cheaper availability of genome data, will provide new ways to customize the therapeutic protocol and enhance our control over diseases and medical treatment.

I was first exposed to the idea of macro-molecular sequences while I was a postdoctoral fellow with Jack Strominger at Harvard. During that time, I briefly visited Fred Sanger's laboratory in Cambridge, England, to learn the methodology of RNA fingerprinting and sequencing.

The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome.

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.

It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.

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

Three billion bases of DNA sequence can be put on a single compact disc and one will be able to pull a CD out of one's pocket and say, 'Here is a human being; it's me!'

Solutions to all biological problems are greatly advanced by the sequencing work and the new tools that are created.

But full sequencing? No. Very hard to interpret. At some point probably we'll all have that opportunity but most of what's there will be stuff that we don't know what to say much about. So it's a great research tool, but for clinical purposes to advise somebody to practice better health maintenance, it's not necessarily gonna be a big one for a while.

DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.

Traditionally, when you talk to people who have Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, they'll talk about how they're in five or six studies, and they've been sequenced by each study. That's just fat in the system. Just have a single data set that then you can share. You can make the entire system more efficient.

It will be possible, through the detailed determination of amino-acid sequences of hemoglobin molecules and of other molecules too, to obtain much information about the course of the evolutionary process, and to illuminate the question of the origin of species.