I'm a pretty informal guy. I ride a Harley.
A technological advance of a major sort almost always is overestimated in the short run for its consequences - and underestimated in the long run.
But full sequencing? No. Very hard to interpret. At some point probably we'll all have that opportunity but most of what's there will be stuff that we don't know what to say much about. So it's a great research tool, but for clinical purposes to advise somebody to practice better health maintenance, it's not necessarily gonna be a big one for a while.
As you kind of get over the anxiety about [science and evolution], it actually adds to your sense of awe about this amazing universe that we live in, it doesn't subtract from it at all.
In my own experience as a physician, I have not seen a miraculous healing, and I don't expect to see one.
I trained initially as a physical chemist, and then, after becoming interested in biology, I went to medical school and learned how to be a physician. So, I'm a physician scientist.
The blooming of a flower is, in my mind, not a miracle. It's something that we can understand on the basis of molecular biology these days.
I'm aware there are certain products that are being advertised - food products - with 'no chemicals whatsoever.' Well, that would be pretty hard to arrange, since everything around us is made up of atoms and molecules - chemicals - including ourselves.
What faith has not been used by demagogues as a club over somebody's head?
We are still working with an incomplete compass. The time is right to bring the full power of genomics to bear on the problem of cancer.
A virus is not just DNA; a virus is also packaged up, covered over with a series of proteins in a nice, elegant, well-compacted form.
We give our kids vaccinations. That's a biological enhancement that's considered not just acceptable but actually admirable.
As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data.
I had the analysis of a million or so SNPs [single nucleotide polymorphisms] just to see what was there. That's partly because I was writing a book about DNA and personalized medicine and I thought it would be a little bit disingenuous to talk about what could be done without actually having the experiment done on yourself.
A lot of people think PMI is the genome project 2.0. No. This is about all the influences on disease - genetics is in there, but the environment is in there as well, health choices, behaviors, all the factors that are important, otherwise we're not doing what we promised we would do - which is in a holistic way look at how people stay healthy or how do they fall ill.
When a drug comes out [that's broadly prescribed] there are going to start to be a lot of people on it [in a million person cohort] and you might get therefore an early signal of something unexpected that hadn't come through in the clinical trials. And I'm sure [drug companies] would love it if, in fact, FDA, recognizing that, would say, OK, maybe you don't have to do your trial with 30,000 people because we're going to find out shortly after registration because we'll have a lot of people taking the drug and we'll be able to see what happened using PMI.
[The tests agreed] that I was at higher risk than the average person for Type 2 diabetes, which is what my lab works on. In fact, some of the things they were testing for were variants that we had discovered.
A lot of science doesn't require big "ns" but if you're trying to understand something about human health and you're looking at interventions that are not going to be either killing you or making you live forever - they're going to have some tweaking on the outcome - you need big numbers or you don't have enough power.
I'm enormously interested to see where neuroscience can take us in understanding these complexities of the human brain and how it works, but I do think there may be limits in terms of what science can tell us about what does good and evil mean anyway, and what are those concepts about?
What does it take to get people interested, what does it take to get people engaged, what does it take to get them to give a biospecimen? What does it take to get people like Jim [Ostell] to get interested and engaged, versus someone like my mother?
[Locating, from scratch, the gene related to a disease is like] trying to find a burned-out light bulb in a house located somewhere between the East and West coasts without knowing the state, much less the town or street the house is on.
The problem [with genetic research] is, we're just starting down this path, feeling our way in the dark. We have a small lantern in the form of a gene, but the lantern doesn't penetrate more than a couple of hundred feet. We don't know whether we're going to encounter chasms, rock walls or mountain ranges along the way. We don't even know how long the path is.
The word 'living' has so many connotations that I'm almost reluctant to try to define it scientifically because it sounds as if I'm then downgrading all the other significances of that word.
I think history would say that medical research has, throughout many changes of parties, remained as one of the shining lights of bipartisan agreement, that people are concerned about health for themselves, for their families, for their constituents.
People who are in a position of finding out that they're at risk for some illness, whether it's breast cancer, or heart disease, are afraid to get that information - even though it might be useful to them - because of fears that they'll lose their health insurance or their job.
