Stephen Hawking Quotes

Dual use research of concern (DURC) is research that, based on current understanding, can be reasonably anticipated to provide knowledge, products, or technologies that could be directly misapplied by others to pose a threat to public health and safety, agricultural crops and other plants, animals, the environment, or materiel

Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.

But I am just as appalled that my experience, knowledge, dedication and service relative to defending the United States against biological warfare has been turned against me in connection with the search for the anthrax killer.

The human race has today the means for annihilating itself—either in a fit of complete lunacy ... or by a careless handling of atomic technology, through the slow poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.

Scientists and security experts will never come to a consensus about the risks of dual-use research in synthetic biology..

Sending us Ebola bombs in the form of sweaty Glaswegians just isn't cricket.

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.

The CIA now assesses that four nations - Iraq, North Korea, Russia and, to the surprise of some specialists, France - have undeclared samples of the smallpox virus.

When I was doing 'Executive Orders,' I talked about Ebola to people who know about infectious diseases and their use as weapons of war, and guys told me that these weapons are more psychological than physical.

New technologies can be used for destructive purposes. The answer is to develop rapid-response systems for new dangers like a bioterrorist creating a new biological virus.

Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the world and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. That's what I think of as the next big one.

Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.

The USDA labs in Ames, Iowa, are level-four security clearance. Every nasty thing you can imagine is stored there. Ground zero for the apocalypse. And there's a day care right across the street.

Sometime in the future, I am a hundred percent certain scientists will sit down at a computer terminal, design what they want the organism to do, and build it.

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.

Just as gene drives can make mosquitos unfit for spreading the malaria parasite, they could concavely be designed with gene drives carrying cargo for delivering lethal bacterial toxins to humans.

Global pandemics---whether naturally occurring or intentionally spread---pose a greater threat than most man-made weapons of mass destruction.

Although biological weapons are highly dangerous, their actual use in war and in terrorist attacks has been relatively rare

Now we must worry as much about hard-to-detect small-scale biological weapons producers as we do about the large-scale nuclear weapons programs

NIH biodefense research is ultimately directed toward the development of new and effective medical countermeasures, including vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics against potential bioterror agents.

Biological terrorism poses the ultimate asymmetric threat but it should be considered in the same class as the nuclear threat.

One letter to bin Laden reveals that al Qaeda was working on chemical and biological weapons in Iran.

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

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