Genome Quotations

Your genome knows much more about your medical history than you do.

Living in your genome is the history of our species.

The overall view of the human genome project has been one of great excitement and positive press, but there are people who have concerns that are quite reasonable, and they are frightened of things they don't understand.

The food we eat goes beyond its macronutrients of carbohydrates, fat and protein. It's information. It interacts with and instructs our genome with every mouthful, changing genetic expression.

Genome-based treatment, based on wider and cheaper availability of genome data, will provide new ways to customize the therapeutic protocol and enhance our control over diseases and medical treatment.

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 human genome contains so much data that, it has been calculated, it would fill 43 volumes of Webster's International Dictionary.

Medicine will be personalized and preventive: Your genome might predict that you have an 80 percent chance of breast cancer by the time you are 50, but if you take a preventive drug starting when you are 40, the chance will drop to 2 percent.

The genome was once thought to be just the blueprint for a living organism, like a combination of the architect's plan for a building and the builder's list of supplies. It specified the parts, the building blocks, and, somehow, the design of the whole, the way in which they are to be put together.

An important finding is that by determining the genome sequences of an entire family, one can identify many DNA sequencing errors and thus greatly increase the accuracy of the data. This will ultimately help us understand the role of genetic variations in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease.

During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project.

We have 200 trillion cells, and the outcome of each of them is almost 100 percent genetically determined. And that's what our experiment with the first synthetic genome proves, at least in the case of really simple bacteria. It's the interactions of all those separate genetic units that give us the physiology that we see.

Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic terms. When we read about the latest discovery of a link between a gene and a disease, we imagine that we've learned the cause of the disease, and we may even think we'll get a cure by fixing the gene.

Since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast into space in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth. Whether there is any creature out there capable of making sense of the instructions in my genome, well, that's another question.

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.

It will be the mother of all telescopes, and you can bet it will do for astronomy what genome sequencing is doing for biology. The clumsy, if utilitarian, name of this mirrored monster is Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST. You can't use it yet, but a peak in the Chilean Andes has been decapitated to provide a level spot for placement.

Each part of our genome is unique. We would not be alive if there was not a single mathematical solution for our chromosomes. We would just be scrambled goo.

From the growth of the Internet through to the mapping of the human genome and our understanding of the human brain, the more we understand, the more there seems to be for us to explore.

People think genes are an absolute cause of traits. But the notion that the genome is the blueprint for humanity is a very bad metaphor. If you think we're hard-wired and deterministic, there should indeed be a lot more genes.

If you know the mother's genome and the father's genome, and you see that the children have some genes that neither parent has, then you know that difference is either a mutation or a processing error.

Sequencing the chimp genome is a historic achievement that is destined to lead to many more exciting discoveries with implications for human health,

One of the good things about the public Human Genome Project is that the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health spent a part of their budget on the ethical, legal, and social implications of their research.

I didn't want my genome to be sequenced by any of the companies that were out there doing the partial sequences just from the point of view of commercialisation.

Having a sequence of the human genome is good, but our ability to interpret it was limited. The mouse sequence provides, for the first time, an ability to determine what matters and what doesn't in the human genome.

Having identified these previously unknown mutations in key cancer causing genes, we will hopefully enable the development of small molecules and antibodies to regulate their abnormal function and thus inhibit the growth of cancerous cells. This collaborative study exemplifies exactly what our coalition was formed to do -- leverage our individual institution's expertise to collectively discover new druggable targets through genome sequencing and functional genomic analysis.

Humans seem more interested in discovering life on Mars than we are on this planet. Yet understanding life on this planet is critical. It is said that modern medicine didn't begin until the completion of the Human Genome Project . Likewise, we can say that modern biology won't begin until we understand who we share this planet with.

Knowing what your parents have gives you hints of things, but your genome is a totally unique combination of and interchange of DNA from your parents. There is no one else like you genetically.

Just as DNA chips revolutionized genome analysis, we hope to make cell chips (self-assembled arrays of cells on a thumbnail-sized chip) using our DNA-based cell adhesion strategy. Cell chips could be used as biosensors for detecting the presence of pathogens, or for drug screening, just to name of a few of the many possibilities.

P-53 has been called the guardian of the genome for the cell.

The approach proposed by the Environmental Genome Project offers great scientific opportunity and the potential to improve public health.

The pig is an outstanding model to study human diseases. Understanding the pig genome should provide enormous opportunities for treating human disorders like obesity, diabetes and heart disease. It also could improve the breeding of pigs to produce human-transplant organs.

We're collecting about 100,000 telomere lengths in saliva samples and then looking at how those relate to both the extensive longitudinal clinical records that Kaiser is collecting and the genome sequence variations.

We have learned nothing from the genome.

When results are shared freely amongst the biological community, as has been done for the worm and the Human Genome Projects, specialist scientists can move much more rapidly towards their goals.

We will enhance coordination of proposed sequencing projects through the Biological and Environmental Research Microbial Sequencing Program or the Joint Genome Institute's Community Sequencing Program.

We said that once we had finished sequencing the genome we would make it available to the scientific community for free, ... And we will be doing that on Monday morning at 10am.

When we look at chimpanzees . . . we get this extremely fine-grained view of evolution, and as a result we understand a lot more about the processes that are changing our own genome over time.

Both agencies will leverage their expertise and synergize activities involving agricultural- and energy-related plants and microbes. We will enhance coordination of proposed sequencing projects through the Biological and Environmental Research Microbial Sequencing Program or the Joint Genome Institute's Community Sequencing Program.

Consider: The human genome consists of about 3.3 billion base pairs. Since there are only four types of pair, that amounts to 0.8 gigabytes of information, or about what you can fit on a CD. With a microwave radio transmitter, you could beam that amount of information into space in a few minutes, and have it travel to anyone at light speed.

The sequencing of the pig genome is a scientific advance that will offer great benefits for consumers and human health.

People think that Celera's trying to patent the whole human genome because it's been used as - I guess people in Washington learn how to do political attacks, and so it gets used as a political weapon, not as a factual one.

People think if you have deciphered the genome of humans that you can change everything. But you cannot change everything, because you do not know what the genes mean, and you have no methods for changing them, and you can't do experiments with humans like you can with animals.

The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome.

Dr. Alt's discoveries have led to a greater understanding of the ways that cancers of immune cells develop and they hold promise for finding ways to control or perhaps prevent these diseases. Dr. Alt's studies of the instability of the genome are central to our understanding of the events that lead to transformation of normal cells to cancer cells.

Anybody that thought the genome was going to directly provide drugs was a fool. Biological networks are not simple, and making drugs to affect them won't be simple.

This is a pair of programs where the public is the main winner. The genome has been compared to a textbook, and what we're talking about today is an opportunity to learn how to read that textbook in a more precise way.

This is the bizarre thing. This exact period I'm writing about is also a period of the most extraordinary scientific and technological achievement, from the mapping of the human genome to the creation of the internet. It seems paradoxical that there should be this proliferation of mumbo jumbo at a time of such immense change and upheaval, but that may be a partial explanation for it.

it's hard to overstate the importance of reading our own instruction book and that's what the human genome project is all about.

Conditions that we know have genetic contributions but which have been rather difficult to nail down, this set of power tools that the genome project is producing will accelerate this discovery process rather dramatically, and we're going to see the consequences of that in the next three to five years,

The fact we now have a number of sites in the genome to look at helps us eliminate some labs, and concentrate on others,

The cancer project scales up to well over 100 Human Genome Projects.

In a sense, the human genome program has the same theme. It is the ultimate answer. Nothing in the individual is more causal, more basic.

If you look on the fungal genome as being soldier candidates protecting the U.S. as our host defense, not only for the ecosystem but for our population... we should be saving our old-growth forests as a matter of national defense.

If you go far enough back, your genome connects you with bacteria, butterflies, and barracuda - the great chain of being linked together through DNA.

In the genomics world, we are supporting Craig Venter's original vision of getting an ability to have gene sequencing occur for the masses. While we have a single genome sequenced, the real benefits for humanity come when there are tens of thousands of genomes sequenced and the computing power available today can correlate certain sequences with certain diseases or drug interactions.

In the Human Genome Project, we at least knew what the endpoint would be. It was just a technology question of how to get there. In our case, we are asking questions that no one knows the answer to because stem cell research is so new.

In the late 1970s, when I was a professor at Caltech, I pioneered four instruments for analyzing genes and proteins that revolutionized modern biology - and one of these, the automated DNA sequencer, enabled the Human Genome Project.

In a few years, we have gone from knowing almost nothing that could be characterized as genomic ... to having complete genome sequences for many organisms, and now a nearly complete catalog of the common genetic differences among people,

Genetics is in pretty deep weeds right now because we put billions of dollars into basic scientific research to sequence the human genome and very little in the transitional aspects of moving it into health care.

I am thrilled to see my genome.

I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.

The ultimate beneficiary of the pig genome project is really not the pork producer, it's the consumer.

The Human Genome Project has given us a genetic parts list.

The human genome itself is just a parts list. The human genome with the chimp genome tells us how these parts have changed.

The goal is not just butterfly collecting or mammal collecting to simply describe mammals. All of that comparative work across mammals is about informing the human genome for medicine. Until we actually understand all the working parts within our genome, we won't really be able to practice the most informed medicine.

The goal of the initial phase of the Environmental Genome Project is to stimulate research in the area of polymorphism discovery.

The Genome Project gave us the letters of the DNA code that we all share.

The genome could finally solve also this problem supposing it is genetically related providing vine growers and nurseries with a sort of trademark for their plants.

The genome could be thought of as a kind of piano with twenty-five thousand keys. In some cases, a few keys may be out of tune, which can cause the music to sound wrong. In others, if one key goes dead the music turns into a cacophony, or the whole piano self-destructs.

The list of genes that will come out of the genome project will be the tool that turns our questions into global ones.

Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.

Advances in our understanding of the human genome promise to revolutionize medicine and open the door to therapies that are tailored to individuals.