Virus Research Quotes

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.

We know there are certain types of viruses that are nasty - influenza, for instance, is an area that is not a blindside. But a lot of viruses have come out of nowhere, like H.I.V., or to a certain extent SARS. Because we know we have the potential to be blindsided, we really have to investigate the unknowns.

It's true that my research expertise is in biology: for example, the Ebola virus, the Marburg virus, and monkey pox, and not bacteriology as in the case of the anthrax organism. It's also true that I have never, ever worked with anthrax in my life. It's a separate field from the research I was performing at Fort Detrick.

My ambition was to bring to bear on medicine a chemical approach. I did that by chemical manipulation of viruses and chemical ways of thinking in biomedical research.

When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying.

The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.

I run a modest-sized laboratory that's looking specifically at what we call 'the pathogenic mechanisms of HIV disease, or AIDS.'

From the practical point of view, the susceptibility to infection of the guinea pig proved to be the most useful step forward. Today, all laboratories use this animal for preserving the virus.

One could not have isolated this retrovirus without knowledge of other retroviruses, that's obvious. But I believe we have answered the criteria of isolation.

Maybe I should mention it: I was not from the beginning mainly interested in papilloma virus; I was mainly interested in infectious agents in human cancer. So papilloma viruses came up as the most likely candidate from my viewpoint.

From some dilatory reading in the early 1960s, I knew enough about viruses and their association with tumors in animals to understand that they might provide a relatively simple entry into a problem as complex as cancer.

I decided to pursue graduate study in molecular biology and was accepted by Professor Itaru Watanabe's laboratory at the Institute for Virus Research at the University of Kyoto, one of a few laboratories in Japan where U.S.-trained molecular biologists were actively engaged in research.