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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I loved the idea that biology was logical.
Sometime in the future, I am a hundred percent certain scientists will sit down at a computer terminal, design what they want the organism to do, and build it.
I see, in the future, bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use.
I fell in love with the elegance and precision of genetic analysis and experimentation to answer profound biological questions.
After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.
As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.
I have been motivated by this idea since I was a kid that if we invented machines that were created in the way that people are - were aware, have free will, inventive machines, machines that would be geniuses - potentially, they could reinvent themselves. They're not just applying it to other things - they could actually redesign themselves.
I was a close observer of the developments in molecular biology.
Give us detailed, testable, mechanistic accounts for the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of ubiquitous bio macromolecules and assemblages like the ribosome, and the origin of molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum, and intelligent design will die a quick and painless death.
We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us.