James D. Watson Quotes

We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before.

I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry.

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

People have freaked out when I tell them that my dragons are scientifically based... what else can you call a genetically engineered life form?

The genomics revolution, proteomics, metabolomics, all of these 'omics' that sound so terrific on grants and on business plans. What we're doing is we are seizing control of our evolutionary future. I mean we're essentially using technology to just jam evolution into fast-forward.

With the advent of genetic engineering the time required for the evolution of new species may literally collapse.

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

Now that we can read and write the genetic code, put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life, it will be possible to speed up biological evolution to the pace of social evolution.

Bio-technology is the science of the future.

Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe.

What's different here is that we have now technologies that allow these life science companies to bypass classical breeding. That's what makes it both powerful and exciting.

We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.

Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it's a very small percentage of the total. That's been changing in the last few years.

What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.

You can now modify the genes of large animals, and the largest animal we are concerned with is the human.

We have created life.

In chemicals, Synthetic Genomics is one of my real loves.

Printing novel DNA might open the way to achievements once only conceivable in science fiction: designer bacteria that can produce new chemicals, such as more efficient fuels, or synthetic versions of our cells that make us resistant to the effects of radiation.

If you get very fine, accurate, and inexpensive control over your genome, you can fundamentally change the kind of organism you are. You are extending human capacity.

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

I'm interested in using evolution to move forward into the future, to get biology to do a lot of new chemistry for us.

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

It once seemed that the most profound feats stemming from DNA-based science would spring from our ability to read and detect genes, which we call the science of genomics. But the real opportunities lie in our ability to write DNA, to synthesize new gene sequences and insert them into organisms, resulting in brand-new biological functions.

We've been modifying the biological world at the level of DNA for thousands of years. Somehow there is this new fear of what we already have been doing and that fear has limited our ability to provide real solutions.

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.