When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it. But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along.

The airman must possess absolutely untroubled nerves.

Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong.

But full sequencing? No. Very hard to interpret. At some point probably we'll all have that opportunity but most of what's there will be stuff that we don't know what to say much about. So it's a great research tool, but for clinical purposes to advise somebody to practice better health maintenance, it's not necessarily gonna be a big one for a while.

A virus is not just DNA; a virus is also packaged up, covered over with a series of proteins in a nice, elegant, well-compacted form.

All illnesses have some heredity contribution. It's been said that genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger.

I had the analysis of a million or so SNPs [single nucleotide polymorphisms] just to see what was there. That's partly because I was writing a book about DNA and personalized medicine and I thought it would be a little bit disingenuous to talk about what could be done without actually having the experiment done on yourself.