Drew Endy Quotes

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.

The potential for synthetic biology and biotechnology is vast; we all have an opportunity to create the future together.

Engineering the biological world was even more interesting than engineering the mechanical world.

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

I decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.

I like to think of synthetic biology as liquid alchemy, only instead of transmuting precious metals, you're synthesizing new biological functionality inside very small channels. It's called microfluidics.

In the end, it's clear that the incorporation of synthetic biology in product and architectural design will enable the transition from designs that are inspired by nature to designs made with and by nature to, possibly, designing nature herself.

Industrial opportunities are going to stem more from the biological sciences than from chemistry and physics. I see biology as being the greatest area of scientific breakthroughs in the next generation.

Bio-technology is the science of the future.

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.

Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?

In the past, biology has been a backwater type of activity - a bunch of nerds in a lab. Now the sheer potential of biology to re-program our physical world is a new reality for everyone.

Bio-Technology is expected to play a major role in improving productivity.

In the earlier years when I started this project at Stanford University, everyone told me it was nuts to go and try to reproduce the mysterious complexities that occur in a whole cell.

If you can write DNA, you're no longer limited to 'what is' but to what you could make.

Better biofuels are a really big deal. That means we can precisely engineer the molecules in the fuel chain and optimize them along the way. So, if all goes well, they're going to have designer bugs in warm vats that are eating and digesting sugars to excrete better biofuels. I guess that's better living through bugs.

As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

Biology is the most powerful technology ever created. DNA is software, protein are hardware, cells are factories.

Simple genome engineering of bacteria and yeast is just the beginning of the rise of the true biohackers. This is a community of several thousand people, with skill sets ranging from self-taught software hackers to biology postdocs who are impatient with the structure of traditional institutional lab work.

I'd like to see what fraction of things that chemists have figured out we could actually teach nature to do. Then we really could replace chemical factories with bacteria.

What I want to do is demonstrate that biology can learn how to make a vast array of molecules that people thought were outside the realm of biology.

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

We went from a world where almost nobody knew anything about computers to a world where almost all of us are computer geeks for a huge fraction of our day. And I'd like to see that happen with the digital world of biological molecules, too.

How we understand our own selves and how we work with our DNA software has implications that will affect everything from vaccine development to new approaches to antibiotics, new sources of food, new sources of chemicals, even potentially new sources of energy.