Thomas Carper Quotes

As we decipher our biology and learn to modify and adjust it, we are learning to modify ourselves - and we will do so. No laws will stop this.

Surely, if we are going to be better at producing food of the right value, then we have to accept that genetic technology... is going to be part of that.

As a scientist I cannot say we don't want to hear anything about GMOs, because these are advances in science. But I think its also important, especially when you are dealing with food, to be cautious.

In the food case in particular, one of the technologies that could help there - genetic technologies that could create better crops with higher yields and less need for water and fertilizer - is tremendously feared. Very little of that fear is scientifically grounded.

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

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

Middle-income countries are the biggest users of GMOs. Places like Brazil.

The unmerited fear of genetically modified organism crops threatens scientific advancements in biotechnology needed to meet the growing global demand for safe and affordable food.

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

We live in a science fictional world with things like cloning and face transplants, and things seem to be getting stranger and stranger.

Writing genetic code like we do software will usher in a completely new way of living for all of us. When this happens, our society will be as fundamentally changed as we have seen from the invention of computers.

Biology is the most powerful technology ever created. DNA is software, protein are hardware, cells are factories.

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.

When something like personal genomics or synthetic biology suddenly appears - it seems to suddenly appear - we might have been working on it for 30 years, but it seems to come out of nowhere. Then you need strategies for engaging a lot of people and thinking about where it will be going in the next few months or few years.

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.

Simple genome engineering of bacteria and yeast is just the beginning of the rise of the true biohackers. This is a community of several thousand people, with skill sets ranging from self-taught software hackers to biology postdocs who are impatient with the structure of traditional institutional lab work.

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.

The best engineered organisms can outpace others, even if they start smaller or later.

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

Instead of studying what biology has already made, we have to imagine what biology could make. You can say, 'Oh, I want a cure for cancer,' but that doesn't tell you what evolutionary pathway will take you from here to there. What are the intermediate steps?