I've never heard God speak out loud to me. That's not an experience I have had.

[Decoding the human genome sequence] is the most significant undertaking that we have mounted so far in an organized way in all of science. I believe that reading our blueprints, cataloguing our own instruction book, will be judged by history as more significant than even splitting the atom or going to the moon.

As an atheist evolving to agnosticism, and seeking answers to whether or not belief in God is potentially rational, my life was turned upside down 35 years ago by reading C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.

What wakes me up at night is this next generation and what's happening to them. And they're invariably excited about the science that they're doing, but invariably anxious about where there's a future.

A technological advance of a major sort almost always is overestimated in the short run for its consequences - and underestimated in the long run.

In my own experience as a physician, I have not seen a miraculous healing, and I don't expect to see one.

I trained initially as a physical chemist, and then, after becoming interested in biology, I went to medical school and learned how to be a physician. So, I'm a physician scientist.