When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it's for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better - ever so much slightly better - at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.

Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience.

What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.

Solutions come through evolution. They come through asking the right questions, because the answers pre-exist. It is the questions that we must define and discover. You don't invent the answer-you reveal the answer.

It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It's my partner.

One of the greatest rewards for doing can be the chances it gives to do some more - even better.

My ambition was to bring to bear on medicine a chemical approach. I did that by chemical manipulation of viruses and chemical ways of thinking in biomedical research.