“Knowing “why” (an idea) is more important than learning “what” (the fact).”

I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.

Our goal should be to understand our differences.

A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.

For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change the world for the better.

The American public is being sold a very nasty bill of goods about cancer.

As an educator, I have always striven to see that the fruits of the American Dream are available to all.

Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely.

Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.

Ever since we achieved a breakthrough in the area of recombinant DNA in 1973, left-wing nuts and environmental kooks have been screaming that we will create some kind of Frankenstein bug or Andromeda Strain that will destroy us all.

Moving forward will not be for the faint of heart. But if the next century witnesses failure, let it be because our science is not yet up to the job, not because we don’t have the courage to make less random the sometimes most unfair courses of human evolution.

People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.

Racists have often used pseudoscience to justify their socially damaging views; watch these films to see how science, by replacing ignorance with knowledge, can undo that damage.

It’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.

The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.

A clone of Einstein wouldn’t be stupid, but he wouldn’t necessarily be any genius, either.