Zitat des Tages von John Sulston:
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.
On my mother's side, I come from Midlands engineers and, on my father's, from tenant farmers near Oxford.
As far back as I remember, and earlier, I was an artisan, a maker and doer. Mechanically minded, my parents said.
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.
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.
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.
Science and the many benefits that science has produced have played a crucial part in our history and produced vast improvements to human welfare.
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.
Biomedical research is only as good as its delivery. Distribution of medicines by charities is no more than a stopgap.
Whilst worthy in themselves, applications shouldn't be the only way to drive basic research.
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.
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.
The Wellcome Trust is a hugely important organisation, and it is vital that its fundraising continues unabated.
You have to say - and I do - that anything that blocks that cheapest possible point-of-care delivery of health is wrong.
Our work on C. elegans emphasized the benefits of sharing large amounts of information. We took a global approach to discover the mechanisms that led to the development of the worm.
Many people thought that, given my knowledge of the egg, I should analyse embryonic mutants.
If we understand the worm, we understand life.
