John Sulston Quotes

John Sulston

Profession : Scientist

Birth : March 27, 1942

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.

John Sulston

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

John Sulston

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.

John Sulston

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.

John Sulston

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.

John Sulston

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

John Sulston

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.

John Sulston

The human world lives in a framework called global economics. We live in a system based on GDP, which drives consumption. it causes people to compete with each other through trade in a way that they all grow.

John Sulston

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.

John Sulston

We can choose to address the twin issues of population and consumption to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption.

John Sulston

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.

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.

John Sulston

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

John Sulston

In science, as in business, there must be structures that ensure the well endowed do not use their position to block competition.

John Sulston

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.

John Sulston

We knew that all the protein-coding bits of genes do is to produce protein - they have to have instructions to turn them on and off. Those sequences lie well outside the protein-coding sequences, sometimes thousands, tens of thousands of bases away.

John Sulston

You have to say - and I do - that anything that blocks that cheapest possible point-of-care delivery of health is wrong.

John Sulston

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.

John Sulston