Ted Kennedy Quotes

I'm fascinated with genetic science, and I have been for a very long time. I always look at science and technology because I think that the developments in my lifetime have been so remarkable - and we're only at the tip of the iceberg with projects like decoding the human genome.

I would only once have the opportunity to let my scientific career encompass a path from the double helix to the three billion steps of the human genome.

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.

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!'

The Human Genome Project has given us a genetic parts list.

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

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.

The human genome contains so much data that, it has been calculated, it would fill 43 volumes of Webster's International Dictionary.

In 15 years we'll have all the sequence, a list of the genes everyone has in common and those that differ among people. We know only something like a tenth of 1 percent of the sequence at the moment.

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.

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

Decoding the human genome is the most significant undertaking that we have mounted so far in an organized way in all of science. I believe that reading our blueprints, cataloguing our own instruction book, will be judged by history as more significant than even splitting the atom or going to the moon.

Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.

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 major credit I think Jim and I deserve ... is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold. Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene. ... We could not see what the answer was, but we considered it so important that we were determined to think about it long and hard, from any relevant point of view.

We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.

I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology.

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

Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable.

Genes themselves are made of bits.

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.

Attempts have been made from a study of the changes produced by mutation to obtain the relative order of the bases within various triplets, but my own view is that these are premature until there is more extensive and more reliable data on the composition of the triplets.

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 body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level - an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.

I wanted to reveal how genetic code is translated into protein. I knew a great application could be for antibiotics, since half of the useful ones target the ribosomes, but I didn't believe I could contribute to it. It was like the next Mount Everest to conquer. It was my dream to contribute something to humanity.