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I think gene therapy and nanotechnology go hand in hand.

Billions of dollars have been put into genetic research.

In the past, when we've tried gene therapy, we haven't had tools that have allowed targeted gene correction.

Even if we never cure a single disease, the Human Genome Project and other ventures will have been worth it.

If genetic research doesn't seemed to have lived up to its therapeutic promise, it's because sequencing is just too slow and expensive.

I hope that the image of gene therapy is changing. It seems to be.

There's already a lot of active research going on using the Crispr technology to fix diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease. They're all diseases that have known genetic causes, and we now have the technology that can repair those mutations to provide, we hope, patients with a normal life.

I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology.

We don't argue if drug companies create drugs that can cure humans and charge lots of money for them, even though we all have these diseases. It will be pretty hard to make a different argument for genes.

Most groups patent ways of using genetic discoveries as part of non-obvious diagnostic and therapeutic protocols and slightly or greatly altered genes.