We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.

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.

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.

I have the same sense of the power and virtue of knowledge that some people get from a religious background.

We know specific genes are turned on in specific cells, but we don't know to what extent this happens.

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.

The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.