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With a hundred and seventy-eight machines to sequence the precise order of the billions of chemicals within a molecule of DNA, B.G.I. produces at least a quarter of the world's genomic data - more than Harvard University, the National Institutes of Health, or any other scientific institution.

Science is a part of culture. Indeed, it is the only truly global culture because protons and proteins are the same all over the world, and it's the one culture we can all share.

In my lab, we're interested in the transition from chemistry to early biology on the early earth.

I decided that the University of Sussex in Brighton was a good place for this work because it had a strong tradition in bacterial molecular genetics and an excellent reputation in biology.

I have some friends, colleagues here at the Karolinska Institute and even in the United States and many other countries too, because we are working together as scientists.

However, it required some years before the scientific community in general accepted that flexibility and disorder are very relevant molecular properties also in other systems.

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

Manufacturing takes place in very large facilities. If you want to build a computer chip, you need a giant semiconductor fabrication facility. But nature can grow complex molecular machines using nothing more than a plant.

Chemists have always been in the business of taking atoms and putting them together with other atoms with precisely defined connections.

Much of my work in biology has been driven by my early training in chemistry. When studying a new chemical compound, the first and most important thing is to determine its detailed molecular structure.