'Bloomberg's, you know, for people who don't use the service, provides through the Internet - through specialized computers - information about the financial world. It's a very large data base. I think they have on the order of a billion dollars or more a year in revenue.

Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.

Most people don't realize it, because they're invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earth's biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass.

Creating life at the speed of light is part of a new industrial revolution. Manufacturing will shift from centralised factories to a distributed, domestic manufacturing future, thanks to the rise of 3D printer technology.

One of the challenges with a government health system, like in the UK, with all of this data, is that you have a government making decisions on which treatments they'll pay for and which ones they won't. That's a dangerous, dangerous, place to get into society.

If I had a weak ego, and doubts about this, the first genome would not yet have been completed with US and UK government funding.

Even though people pretend that medical records are privileged information, anyone can already get their hands on them.

Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective.

I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.

The day is not far off when we will be able to send a robotically controlled genome-sequencing unit in a probe to other planets to read the DNA sequence of any alien microbe life that may be there.

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry.

Life is a DNA software system.

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.

As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.

When you think of all the things that are made from oil or in the chemical industry, if in the future we could find cells to replace most of those processes, the ideal way would be to do it by direct design.

Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.

In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.

Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.