John Sulston Quotes
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Muriel, my mother, was my main confidant. She was a teacher of English at Watford grammar school but took a break while my sister Madeleine and I were children. She held court in the kitchen, and we talked about everything.
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As far back as I remember, and earlier, I was an artisan, a maker and doer. Mechanically minded, my parents said.
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It is not a Pandora's box that science opens; it is, rather, a treasure chest. We, humanity, can choose whether or not to take out the discoveries and use them, and for what purpose.
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If we understand the worm, we understand life.
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I don't think one ought to bring a clearly disabled child into the world.
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We knew that all the protein-coding bits of genes do is to produce protein - they have to have instructions to turn them on and off. Those sequences lie well outside the protein-coding sequences, sometimes thousands, tens of thousands of bases away.
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If you patent a discovery which is unique, say a human gene or even just one particular function of a human gene, then you are actually creating a monopoly, and that's not the purpose of the world of patents.
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Science and the many benefits that science has produced have played a crucial part in our history and produced vast improvements to human welfare.
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In science, as in business, there must be structures that ensure the well endowed do not use their position to block competition.
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The currencies of science are discoveries and ideas; the rewards are the excitement of going where nobody has been before and, if one is inclined to such things, the kudos of peer acclaim, plus funds to do more research.
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I don't want a few extra weeks of life at enormous cost, for example, when it comes to the end.
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There's always a tension between those who would like to garner wealth, and they contribute a lot to society. There's also those who say, 'I believe in the common good. I want that to be enlarged.' They contribute a lot to society. The tension, the debate, between these two views is extremely important to our progress.
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I wandered along to the chemistry labs, more or less on the rebound, and asked about becoming a research student. It was the '60s, a time of university expansion: the doors were open, and a 2:1 was good enough to get me in.
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We can choose to address the twin issues of population and consumption to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption.
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What is the purpose of being human and alive without doing new things?
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The human world lives in a framework called global economics. We live in a system based on GDP, which drives consumption. it causes people to compete with each other through trade in a way that they all grow.
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I'm pleased that some economists and sociologists are beginning to talk about, for example, alternative measures of human well-being - alternative, that is, to GDP, on which the world runs.
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The only thing I have retained from my upbringing - I did not retain the religious element - is the idea that you do not do things for money.
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When results are shared freely amongst the biological community, as has been done for the worm and the Human Genome Projects, specialist scientists can move much more rapidly towards their goals.
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Whilst worthy in themselves, applications shouldn't be the only way to drive basic research.
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It was a matter of not living lavishly but enjoying what you had, growing things with your hands, working hard, but not being tied to a nine-to-five job, and generally feeling that there's more to life than money.
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An awful lot of food is thrown away. This you can call a spillover. It doesn't sort of enter into our economic system because it's a consequence of running things in a highly competitive way: the free market, global pricing and so on.
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I would say if we can select children who are not going to be severely disadvantaged, then we should do so, but I think it has to be done by voluntary choice.
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I believe our basic information, our 'software', should be free and open for everyone to play with, to compete with, to try and make products from. I do not believe it should be under the control of one person.