Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.
By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and you stretch your own mind, and very often you learn something new.
Early on, it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise, even if what you're writing about is not that relevant.
Error is far more common than fraud which probably comprises 1 percent or a tenth of a percent of the literature.
Everyone wants a hand in the outcome, a piece of the knowledge.
I have the same sense of the power and virtue of knowledge that some people get from a religious background.
I suggested evolution started off with tiny genes that coded for pieces of proteins and that large pieces of DNA were assembled by adding introns, like glue, to tie the exons together.
In 15 years we'll have all the sequence, a list of the genes everyone has in common and those that differ among people. We know only something like a tenth of 1 percent of the sequence at the moment.
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.
It's easier to change what you do than people think it is. If you don't change, your field changes around you.
Science doesn't in the slightest depend on trust. It depends completely on the belief that you can demonstrate something for yourself.
Scientists tend to be skeptical, but the weakness of the community of science is that it tends to move into preformed establishment modes that say this is the only way of doing science, the only valid view.
The best project is one that asks a novel question.
The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.
The idea that one can create a single subspecies that breeds true and is superhealthy and so on is an illusion.
The interaction of the variation in our genes is what's responsible for lots of our attributes and vigor.
The list of genes that will come out of the genome project will be the tool that turns our questions into global ones.
The really fascinating thing about research is the new science, but to get to it, you have to get past that first level.
The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.
To construct something as complicated as our bodies, we turn on different genes in muscles, skin, and so on to structure them.
Today we try to identify a gene and then study its properties.
We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.
We can learn about the pattern of evolution by looking at the structure of genes and comparing the structure of proteins.
We haven't been able yet to determine in terms of genes what makes a human being a human and not another mammal.
We know specific genes are turned on in specific cells, but we don't know to what extent this happens.
Why do we do basic research? To learn about ourselves.
With everything I do, I am well advised to repeat the experiment I'm starting from.
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