Francis Collins Information Quotations

A cardinal principle that we must not stray from - no exceptions - is that your genetic information is your business in terms of who sees it. Nobody should be gaining access to that information without your explicit permission, and nobody should be requiring you to take a genetic test unless you decide that that's what you want to do.

As a Christian, but also as a scientist responsible for overseeing the Human Genome Project, one of my concerns has been the limits on applications of our understanding of the genome. Should there be limits? I think there should. I think the public has expressed their concern about ways this information might be misused.

If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, and somebody has already cataloged all the straw in the haystack, when you get to that needle you will recognize it's different than what was supposed to be there based on all that computerized haystack information that had been predetermined for you.

The question is if we do collect a lot of genetic material from people ... are you going to see those people then injured when their health provider or employer uses that information to take away opportunities. At the moment, in the United States particularly, those protections are not in place at a federal level.

These revelations arrive almost five years early from the original predictions of not having this information until 2005, and here we are. We have the first draft of our own book of life and we've read it from cover to cover, and we've discovered some pretty amazing surprises,