Walter Gilbert

“One could in principle make a human being, which would be a great biological invention.”

“There is a tension in science between discovery and invention.”

“All our knowledge is about the past, and all our decisions are about the future.”

“The goal of the Human Genome Project is to get a sequence of the human genome, a 3 billion-letter-long sequence, and to find all the genes in it.”

“The development of new technology is always a double-edged sword.”

“The RNA world is a hypothetical stage in the evolutionary history of life on Earth, in which self-replicating RNA molecules proliferated before the evolution of DNA and proteins.”

“The notion that the public is better off not knowing things is a paternalistic and anti-democratic view.”

“I think the next century will be the century of the brain.”

“To get the whole human genome sequence would be a fantastic accomplishment.”