Top 25 John Sulston Quotes

Title deeds establish and protect ownership of our houses, while security of property is as important to the proprietors of Tesco and Sainsbury’s as it is to their customers.

Muriel, my mother, was my main confidant. She was a teacher of English at Watford grammar school but took a break while my sister Madeleine and I were children. She held court in the kitchen, and we talked about everything.

The fruits of science and innovation have nourished our society and economy for years, but nations unable to navigate our regulatory system are often excluded, as are vulnerable individuals.

It is very clear that the present system of innovation for medicines is very inefficient and really somewhat corrupt. It benefits shareholders over patients; it produces for the rich markets and not for the poor and does not produce for minority diseases.

I don’t want a few extra weeks of life at enormous cost, for example, when it comes to the end.

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.

On my mother’s side, I come from Midlands engineers and, on my father’s, from tenant farmers near Oxford.

I don’t think one ought to bring a clearly disabled child into the world.

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.

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.

When results are shared freely amongst the biological community, as has been done for the worm and the Human Genome Projects, specialist scientists can move much more rapidly towards their goals.

The currencies of science are discoveries and ideas; the rewards are the excitement of going where nobody has been before and, if one is inclined to such things, the kudos of peer acclaim, plus funds to do more research.

The strong evidence is that we’re running out of space. We’re collectively affecting the world’s climate. This is due to the still-growing human population and our increase in consumption.

I wandered along to the chemistry labs, more or less on the rebound, and asked about becoming a research student. It was the ’60s, a time of university expansion: the doors were open, and a 2:1 was good enough to get me in.

It was a matter of not living lavishly but enjoying what you had, growing things with your hands, working hard, but not being tied to a nine-to-five job, and generally feeling that there’s more to life than money.

When it came to choice of subjects, science was obvious – since I was uninterested in anything else – but a decision that caused consternation in some eyes was my demand to take biology for A-level.

The free market is the epitome of life itself. This is something that all scientists recognise because science itself operates on free market lines.

Science and the many benefits that science has produced have played a crucial part in our history and produced vast improvements to human welfare.

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.

Many people thought that, given my knowledge of the egg, I should analyse embryonic mutants.

Biomedical research is only as good as its delivery. Distribution of medicines by charities is no more than a stopgap.

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.

In order to protect the market value of a proprietary database, the owner must prohibit redistribution of the contents – otherwise, the information would quickly leak out and be widely known.

I would say if we can select children who are not going to be severely disadvantaged, then we should do so, but I think it has to be done by voluntary choice.

What is the purpose of being human and alive without doing new things?