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Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.

The most profound change that genetics brings about might not be scientific at all. It might be mental and even spiritual enrichment: a more expansive sense of who we humans are, existentially, and where we came from, and how we fit with other life on earth.

The more that I looked at DNA, the more I realized it was nature and nurture. It's how genes and your environment work together to produce the person you are.

No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?

One of the things about genetics that has become clearer as we've done genomes - as we've worked our way through the evolutionary tree, including humans - is that we're probably much more genetic animals than we want to confess we are.

We can't any longer have the conventional understanding of genetics which everybody peddles because it is increasingly obvious that epigenetics - actually things which influence the genome's function - are much more important than we realised.

The implication is that this basic idea we have that we are controlled by our genes is false. It's an idea that turns us into victims. I'm saying we are the creators of our situation. The genes are merely the blueprints. We are the contractors, and we can adjust those blueprints. And we can even rewrite them.

It's an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical - it is in any animal merely statistical - not deterministic.

In the past, geneticists have looked at so-called disease genes, but a lot of people have changes in their genes and don't get these diseases. There have to be other parts of physiology and genetics that compensate.

All human beings are, in fact, born with dozens of mutations their parents lacked, and a few of those mutations could well be lethal if we didn't have two copies of every gene, so one can pick up the slack if the other malfunctions.