Quotes from Mark Walport

I was always taught at medical school that you should never do a test unless you could do something with the result.

Public trust is a vital condition for artificial intelligence to be used productively.

It was and has been one of the major interventions in public health, and it's absolutely vital that people vaccinate their children.

Science, engineering, and technology have transformed the infrastructure of the modern world and have a vital role to play at the heart of policy making.

Like Israel, the U.K. is a democracy, and like Israel, we would never want to muzzle political voices, whatever their opinions - and that is especially true for universities.

As medical data has such power to deliver better understanding of disease and better patient outcomes, it is important we find the best way of sharing it.

Sharing data allows us to research, communicate, consume media, buy and sell, play games, and more. In return, businesses develop products, scientists undertake research, and governments use data to enable voting, inform policies, collect tax, and provide better public services.

In medicine, there is always a balance between risk and benefit.

Distributed ledgers are inherently harder to attack because instead of a single database, there are multiple shared copies of the same database, so a cyber stack would have to attack all the copies simultaneously to be successful.

We owe it to ourselves and to our policy makers to have a high standard of public debate about the future of our energy supplies.

We take it for granted that because our shelves and supermarkets are heaving with food that there are no problems with food security. But we have limited land in the U.K., and climate disruption and population growth are putting pressure on food supply.

If you look at U.K. science, we collaborate with people across the whole world, and it's extremely important we continue to do so in the future.

We clearly have to reduce harmful energy emissions. Everyone acknowledges we simply can't switch off fossil fuels overnight.

Living in areas with a high population density does not need to be synonymous with overcrowding. Manhattan has an extremely dense population and is considered by many to be a highly desirable place to live.

Scientists have argued that research is good for health, wealth, and society, and the government has trusted them on that.

Cities are central to the shaping and delivery of national policy objectives, and in return, they are the places where social, environmental, and economic policies play out in practice.

David Sainsbury has been good for science and good for innovation in the U.K. He has been an outstanding science minister and shown extraordinary passion and commitment to his portfolio.

The U.K. is fortunate in its geographical position. We're an island. But we are living in a completely interconnected world where disruptions in countries far away will have major impacts.

New technology creates a new marketplace of words, creating totally new words and changing the meaning and application of existing ones. In doing so, it has a potent opportunity to create new misconceptions and confusion.

Wellcome Trust focuses on supporting outstanding researchers, accelerating the application of research, and exploring medicine in historical and cultural contexts. We believe passionately that breakthroughs emerge when the most talented researchers are given the resources and freedom they need to pursue their goals.

When governments work well, they safeguard citizens' health, well-being, resilience and security, and they increase prosperity. To do this, they must respond effectively to the new, the unexpected, and the game-changing.

Wellcome Collection will be an exciting place in which to explore themes of human well-being, starting with the powerful collections of Sir Henry Wellcome.

It is a fiction to imagine that the haphazard paper chits of old are more private than the modern digital alternative. Paper records have always presented a security risk.

People have extreme beliefs about whether it is right for humans to tamper with embryos in any way at all. Sometimes the values discussion gets conflated with the science discussion. We shouldn't pretend we're having an argument about science when we're having an argument about values.