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Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.

In genomics, there's a massive amount of information in which you can look for patterns and develop insights.

I fell in love with the elegance and precision of genetic analysis and experimentation to answer profound biological questions.

Today we try to identify a gene and then study its properties.

In the earlier years when I started this project at Stanford University, everyone told me it was nuts to go and try to reproduce the mysterious complexities that occur in a whole cell.

It is particularly pleasing to see how purely basic research, originally aimed at testing the genetic identity of different cell types in the body, has turned out to have clear human health prospects.

Therefore, I reasoned that study of the cell cycle responsible for the reproduction of cells was important and might even be illuminating about the nature of life.

Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.

I was driven completely by a desire to understand how cells worked.

And of course, identifying all human genes and proteins will have great medical significance.