John Sulston Quotations

When it came to choice of subjects, science was obvious - since I was uninterested in anything else - but a decision that caused consternation in some eyes was my demand to take biology for A-level.

Muriel, my mother, was my main confidant. She was a teacher of English at Watford grammar school but took a break while my sister Madeleine and I were children. She held court in the kitchen, and we talked about everything.

An awful lot of food is thrown away. This you can call a spillover. It doesn't sort of enter into our economic system because it's a consequence of running things in a highly competitive way: the free market, global pricing and so on.

The human world lives in a framework called global economics. We live in a system based on GDP, which drives consumption. it causes people to compete with each other through trade in a way that they all grow.

Science and the many benefits that science has produced have played a crucial part in our history and produced vast improvements to human welfare.

Whilst worthy in themselves, applications shouldn't be the only way to drive basic research.

In order to protect the market value of a proprietary database, the owner must prohibit redistribution of the contents - otherwise, the information would quickly leak out and be widely known.

In science, as in business, there must be structures that ensure the well endowed do not use their position to block competition.

We knew that all the protein-coding bits of genes do is to produce protein - they have to have instructions to turn them on and off. Those sequences lie well outside the protein-coding sequences, sometimes thousands, tens of thousands of bases away.

It was a matter of not living lavishly but enjoying what you had, growing things with your hands, working hard, but not being tied to a nine-to-five job, and generally feeling that there's more to life than money.