Human Genome Quotes

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

Iain McGilchrist

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

Craig Venter

#3. Before the Human Genome Project, most scientists assumed, based on our complex brains and behaviors, that humans must have around 100,000 genes; some estimates went as high as 150,000.

Sam Kean

#4. I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt.

Thomas Friedman

#5. 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.

Juan Enriquez

#6. One of the big challenges now is to figure out just how many viruses there really are in the human genome. So far the estimate is 8.3% of our genome is virus, but it actually could be a lot higher.

Carl Zimmer

#7. 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.

Leroy Hood

#8. If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few remaining disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.

Yuval Noah Harari

#9. 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.

Craig Venter

#10. The human genome is a life written in a book where every word has been written before. A story endlessly rehearsed.

Johnny Rich

#11. If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.

Peter Singer

#12. I'm hoping that these next 20 years will show what we did 20 years ago in sequencing the first human genome, was the beginning of the health revolution that will have more positive impact in people's lives than any other health event in history.

Craig Venter

#13. 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.

Martin Rees

#14. When burned on a CD, the human genome is smaller than Microsoft Office.

Steve Jurvetson

#15. It appears that the human genome does indeed contain deserts, or large, gene-poor regions.

Craig Venter

#16. 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.

John Sulston

#17. We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by human kind.

William J. Clinton

#18. Evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory put it, anyone who thinks he or she can assign a function to every letter in the human genome should be asked why an onion needs a genome that is about five times larger than a person's. Who's resorting

Matt Ridley

#19. Some software is actually pretty good, by any standard. Think of the Mars Rovers, Google, and the Human Genome Project. Now, that's quality software!

Bjarne Stroustrup

#20. Raises a fundamental question: are we also evolving genetically? Medical research, added to a deepening analysis of the three billion nucleotide letters of the human genome, has revealed that evolution is indeed still occurring

Edward O. Wilson

#21. At a time when we can split the atom, land on the moon, and decode the human genome, why do 2 billion people live on less than $2 a day?

Charles Wheelan

#22. The decoding of the human genome tells us that we are indeed related to the animals, the insects, and the plants, and that, like it or not, Earth is where we belong.

Ian McCallum

#23. Well, the human genome has massive redundancy - that means that two per cent of the DNA does all the work of instructing the ribosomes that build the proteins that make up the cells of your body. Ninety-eight per cent of your DNA just sits there doing nothing. Taking up space in the gene.

Ian McDonald

#24. Even if we never cure a single disease, the Human Genome Project and other ventures will have been worth it.

Sam Kean

#25. I'm fascinated with genetic science, and I have been for a very long time. I always look at science and technology because I think that the developments in my lifetime have been so remarkable - and we're only at the tip of the iceberg with projects like decoding the human genome.

Nick Rhodes

#26. 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.

Sydney Brenner

#27. I would only once have the opportunity to let my scientific career encompass a path from the double helix to the three billion steps of the human genome.

James D. Watson

#28. When I discover something about the human genome, I experience a sense of awe at the mystery of life, and say to myself, 'Wow, only God knew before.' It is a profoundly beautiful and moving sensation, which helps me appreciate God and makes science even more rewarding for me.

Francis Collins

#29. About 1.2% of the human genome is made up of genes, things that encode for proteins, the stuff that we consider us. There is about 8.3% that's a virus. In other words we're probably about seven times more virus than we are human genes, which is kind of a weird way to thinking about yourself.

Carl Zimmer

#30. If you're looking for your own idea of your own identity you know the human genome may not be the best place to look for it. You're just looking at a bunch of viruses.

Carl Zimmer

#31. The very genetic determinism I posited in World's End as a way of shaking off my inherited demons is being proven in fact as we map out the human genome.

T.C. Boyle

#32. 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.

Thomas R. Cech

#33. I respect and value the ideals of rugged individualism and self-reliance. But rugged individualism didn't defeat the British, it didn't get us to the moon, build our nation's highways, or map the human genome. We did that together. This is the high call of patriotism.

Cory Booker

#34. The fact is that proprietary databases don't work for such basic and broadly needed information as the sequence of the human genome.

John Sulston

#35. The human genome is a script, waiting for the amino actors, the protein players to strut and fret their hour.

Johnny Rich

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

Leroy Hood

#37. Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

Bill Gates

#38. Once a genetic component has been established, the search for the genes involved can begin. This is a time-consuming and complex process that has recently been greatly facilitated by the information obtained by the Human Genome Project.51

Joseph E. Ledoux

#39. Sometimes it is claimed by those who argue that race is just a social construct that the human genome project shows that because people share roughly 99% of their genes in common, that there are no races. This is silly.

J. Philippe Rushton

#40. I would like to do a series about sequencing the human genome, and also analyze more human diversity among other ethnic groups - a 'Faces of America 2.'

Henry Louis Gates

#41. The genome of every human cell has memory. You know what that means? As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own.

E.L. Doctorow

#42. Read the book of life or a life in a book: it's all epigraphs and anagrams.

Johnny Rich

#43. Human experience depends on everything that can influence states of the human brain, ranging from changes in our genome to changes in the global economy.

Sam Harris

#44. Plasticity is an intrinsic property of the human brain and represents evolution's invention to enable the nervous system to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences.

Philippa Perry

#45. One key lesson learned from mapping the genome is that access to a rough initial map proved crucial to developing more detailed maps of small individual human differences.

Gary F. Marcus

#46. I think I've achieved some good things; doing the first genome in history - my team on that was phenomenal and all the things they pulled together; writing the first genome with a synthetic cell; my teams at the Venter Institute, Human Longevity, and before that Celera.

Craig Venter

#47. There were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn't seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as "junk DNA," though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome "junk," given our level of ignorance.

Francis S. Collins