- All Quotes
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As a medical student in the 1970s, I was taught that the foundations of diagnosis and treatment were to take a detailed history and to perform a comprehensive clinical examination.
Mark Walport -
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.
Mark Walport
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Forensic science offers great potential, as it draws on almost every discipline and, in doing so, creates widespread opportunity for innovation.
Mark Walport -
The most dangerous infections of humans have always been those which have emerged from other species.
Mark Walport -
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.
Mark Walport -
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.
Mark Walport -
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.
Mark Walport -
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.
Mark Walport
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Common sense, proportionality, and judgment are the skills we must seek in those we choose to regulate our lives.
Mark Walport -
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.
Mark Walport -
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.
Mark Walport -
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.
Mark Walport -
When governments work well, they safeguard citizens' health, well-being, resilience and security, and they increase prosperity. To do this, they must respond effectively to the new, the unexpected, and the game-changing.
Mark Walport -
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.
Mark Walport
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It's been an enormous privilege to be the government chief scientific adviser.
Mark Walport -
When you check into a hotel, they don't need to know your name and address; they just need to know that the bill will be paid. People should ask questions.
Mark Walport -
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.
Mark Walport -
No one likes doing primate experiments, but some research can only be done on monkeys.
Mark Walport -
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.
Mark Walport -
The government is right to recognise the importance of science and technology, but I think it is a mistake to ringfence funds.
Mark Walport
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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.
Mark Walport -
Public trust is a vital condition for artificial intelligence to be used productively.
Mark Walport -
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.
Mark Walport -
People have extreme beliefs about whether it is right for humans to tamper with embryos in any way at all. Sometimes the values discussion gets conflated with the science discussion. We shouldn't pretend we're having an argument about science when we're having an argument about values.
Mark Walport