Mark Walport Quotes
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I've never been a proponent of something monolithic.
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I was always taught at medical school that you should never do a test unless you could do something with the result.
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We do some experiments in humans, some in mice, and there are some questions that can only be answered in nonhuman primates. It's true that you can't immediately say that those experiments will translate into human health, but nevertheless, it is obvious that having an understanding of human memory is going to be important for human health.
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Science, engineering, and technology have transformed the infrastructure of the modern world and have a vital role to play at the heart of policy making.
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The European Parliament must send a clear sign that it recognises the importance of embryonic stem cell research.
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It's been an enormous privilege to be the government chief scientific adviser.
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A computer, by definition, cannot be held accountable for anything because there is no mechanism to hold it to account, short of turning off the electricity supply or destroying the hardware. Only humans can be accountable.
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Cities are central to the shaping and delivery of national policy objectives, and in return, they are the places where social, environmental, and economic policies play out in practice.
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We all want our drugs to be safe - and so an essential part of the pathway to the development of a new drug is approval by a regulator.
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It seems paradoxical that, as medical scientists make huge advances in discovering the mechanisms of common diseases, fewer and fewer innovative drugs are reaching the market.
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We pretend that the debate about genetically modified crops is a debate about science when the reality is, actually, that the science is very clear. It is really a debate about values.
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The government is right to recognise the importance of science and technology, but I think it is a mistake to ringfence funds.
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Distributed ledgers are inherently harder to attack because instead of a single database, there are multiple shared copies of the same database, so a cyber stack would have to attack all the copies simultaneously to be successful.
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The most dangerous infections of humans have always been those which have emerged from other species.
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Distributed ledger technologies have the potential to help governments to collect taxes, deliver benefits, issue passports, record land registries, assure the supply chain of goods, and generally ensure the integrity of government records and services.
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If you look at my track record as government chief scientific advisor, I've always recognized that all of the sciences are important to all of research, and we need a balance.
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Common sense, proportionality, and judgment are the skills we must seek in those we choose to regulate our lives.
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It is a fiction to imagine that the haphazard paper chits of old are more private than the modern digital alternative. Paper records have always presented a security risk.
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Of course methane is a fossil fuel, but as long as it is burned efficiently and fugitive emissions of methane gas are minimised, it is a less harmful fossil fuel than coal and oil and is an important way-station on the global journey towards low-carbon energy.
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My job is to advise politicians, elected officials, and government ministries of the best way to deal with important issues, both localized, national, and the grand challenges facing humanity.
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The U.K. is fortunate in its geographical position. We're an island. But we are living in a completely interconnected world where disruptions in countries far away will have major impacts.
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Many families would like to avoid burdening future generations with inherited diseases such as haemophilia or severe developmental disorders. But most would think it wrong to edit the genes that influence the 'normal' range of human variation, from eye colour to intelligence or athletic ability.
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No one likes doing primate experiments, but some research can only be done on monkeys.
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We owe it to ourselves and to our policy makers to have a high standard of public debate about the future of our energy supplies.