Bonnie Bassler Quotes

I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years.

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

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.

I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt.

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.

We have discovered over 95 percent of all the genes that have been discovered by science off the deck of my sailboat.

I think I've achieved some good things; doing the first genome in history - my team on that was phenomenal and all the things they pulled together; writing the first genome with a synthetic cell; my teams at the Venter Institute, Human Longevity, and before that Celera.

I think we're just scratching the surface. One of the most exciting aspects of 23andMe is that we're enabling you to watch a revolution unfold live during your lifetime, and I think that the decoding of the genome, in my opinion, is the most fascinating discovery of our lifetime, and you get to be part of it.

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.

When I discover something about the human genome, I experience a sense of awe at the mystery of life, and say to myself, 'Wow, only God knew before.' It is a profoundly beautiful and moving sensation, which helps me appreciate God and makes science even more rewarding for me.

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

At lunch Francis [Crick] winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.

The success in the determination of the high-resolution structures of ribosomal subunits and eventually the whole ribosome was the culmination of decades of effort.

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

In the early 1950s, during the near avalanche of discoveries, rediscoveries, and redefinitions of subcellular components made possible by electron microscopy, those prospecting in this newly opened field were faced with the problem of what to do with their newly acquired wealth.

Today we try to identify a gene and then study its properties.

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.

I left my frogs, which I had grown, with my supervisor, who had moved to Geneva, and he and a technician grew them up. So by 1962, they were adults, and one could publish a paper to say that these animals, derived from nuclear transfer, really were absolutely normal. So it took a little time to get through.

My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.

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

Our understanding of how DNA informs our health and development is advancing at an incredible pace.

Billions of dollars have been put into genetic research.

I think there are people who's lives have been saved because of the study of the genome.

Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic terms. When we read about the latest discovery of a link between a gene and a disease, we imagine that we've learned the cause of the disease, and we may even think we'll get a cure by fixing the gene.

Here at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, we have genetically rearranged various viruses and bacteria as part of our medical research. In fact, we have been able to create entirely new types of DNA molecules by splicing together the genetic information from different organisms - recombinant DNA.