Bruce Beutler Quotations

People may have said that without symptoms, you can't transmit Ebola. I'm not sure about that being 100 percent true. There's a lot of variation with viruses.

Chance leads to discoveries, and mutagenesis is a way to enhance one's chances of finding a surprise. Often it is the exceptional observations that lead to advances; once you understand exceptions, you understand the whole picture.

A mutation can create an alternative form of a phenomenon - a phenotype or trait - and we can learn a lot by seeing this alternative state. Once I saw a mouse with no eyelids. It simply had a membrane over the eyes. I found it fascinating that there is a single gene required for eyelids to develop.

Science is far from the center of the world for most people: even for many with highly sophisticated tastes, interests, and accomplishments.

My idea right from the beginning, I guess, was to dismantle the immune system one gene at a time so we could track the mutations that cause problems.

In college, I had an early introduction to classical genetics from Professor Dan Lindsley, also an extraordinary teacher who influenced me greatly.

If you really want to isolate a disease, then you have to isolate the people who carry it.

If we think of the immune system as a machine, then we are far from even knowing all of its parts.

I grew up hoping that my father might win a Nobel Prize.

Autoimmunity is probably the next frontier. The majority of cases of autoimmune disease result from a complex genetic problem that has environmental influences. It is a colossal task for the immune system to maintain tolerance to self and yet be ready to react to everything in the world around us.