Janine Benyus Quotes

Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.

The major thing is to view biology as an information science.

There's so much I'm interested in that I didn't discover in high school. For 'The Amazing Spider-Man', because Gwen is a scientist, we went to a lab in San Diego, and we were learning about biology. And I'm fascinated! Because I never went to biology class in high school.

Biology is now accelerating at a pace faster than Moore's Law.

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

We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.

Studying organisms at a molecular level was totally compelling because it was moving from being a naturalist, which was the 19th-century kind of science, to being very focused and really getting to the heart of these molecules.

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.

I didn't study science beyond high school level, but I'd been reading a lot of science books by people like Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley and Daniel Dennett. I also spent a year working on a fellowship in a research centre - the Allan Wilson Centre - where I got a hands-on look at their work sequencing DNA.

Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.

I have a biology degree, okay?

I was a close observer of the developments in molecular biology.

We can do genetics. We can do experiments on fruit flies. We can do experiments on yeast. It's not so easy to do experiments on humans. So, in fact, it helps us, to interpret our own genetic code, to have the genetic code of the other species.

A big tree seemed even more beautiful to me when I imagined thousands of tiny photosynthesis machines inside every leaf. So I went to MIT and worked on bacteria because that's where people knew the most about these switches, how to control the genetics.

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.

If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.

I have had the good fortune to live - as an inside witness and, even, a modest participant - at a time when our understanding of this wonder we call 'life' has made its most revolutionary advances.

Britain should be the world's number one center for genetic and stem cell research, building on our world leading regulatory regime in the area.

But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.

We're scientists; we're curious about how nature works, but we're also do-gooders. It's fantastic to think that the same experiments we'd do to understand how information gets into cells could have a practical side to them, too.

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

I started taking a basic biology course, and I really loved it. I started asking research questions incessantly. I was drawn very quickly to biology.

April 25th is DNA Day. I know, you probably had no idea.

What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.

Guinea pigs are practically synonymous with experiments. Lab rats have become the workhorses of modern medicine. Genetics owes a huge debt to the humble fruit fly. There's almost no branch of the life sciences, in fact, that hasn't leaned heavily on one animal or another.