All these names are bigger-than-life names, ... When you see their actual letters and their notebooks, it puts a real stamp of humanity on these people.

It turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA - 30 to 50 letters in length - and it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are.

We can now diagnose diseases that haven't even manifested in the patient, and may not until the fifth decade of life - if at all.

We're a country of laws and rules, and the Supreme Court has ruled that life forms are patentable entities.

I've always been fascinated with adrenaline; it's saved my life more than once, and it's caused me to need it to save my life more than once. One of the most fascinating responses in human evolution, adrenaline sharpens your brain; it sharpens your responses.

The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people's lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.