People equate patents with secrecy, that secrecy is what patents were designed to overcome. That's why the formula for Coca-Cola was never patented. They kept it as a trade secret, and they've outlasted patent laws by 80 years or more.
We can do genetics. We can do experiments on fruit flies. We can do experiments on yeast. It's not so easy to do experiments on humans. So, in fact, it helps us, to interpret our own genetic code, to have the genetic code of the other species.
When you do cross-breeding of plants, you're doing this blind experiment where you're just mixing DNA of different types of cells and just seeing what comes out of it.
Since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast into space in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth. Whether there is any creature out there capable of making sense of the instructions in my genome, well, that's another question.
If I could change the science system, my prescription for changing the whole thing would be organising it around big goals and building teams to do it.
We have 200 trillion cells, and the outcome of each of them is almost 100 percent genetically determined. And that's what our experiment with the first synthetic genome proves, at least in the case of really simple bacteria. It's the interactions of all those separate genetic units that give us the physiology that we see.
Sometime in the future, I am a hundred percent certain scientists will sit down at a computer terminal, design what they want the organism to do, and build it.
Most people don't realize it, because they're invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earth's biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass.
Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.
Even with seemingly simple things like eye color, you can't tell from my genetic code whether I have blue eyes or not. So it's naive to think that complex human behaviors, like risk-seeking, are driven by changes in one or two genes.
I was a surf bum wannabe. I left home at age 17 and moved to Southern California to try to take up surfing as a vocation, but this was in 1964, and there was this nasty little thing called the Vietnam War. As a result, I got drafted.
