Quotes from Mark Walport

Climate change is happening, and humans are significant contributors, and that raises some really important policy questions.

It would be silly not to admit that there are some sections of the public who are unconvinced by the benefits or have doubts about the motives behind it. We have to be clear that GM is not all about profits for multinational companies.

There is usually a long interval between important scientific discoveries and impact on human health.

Industrialisation, mass transit, and the Internet are technological revolutions that have reshaped lives, nations, and the planet.

We do some experiments in humans, some in mice, and there are some questions that can only be answered in nonhuman primates. It's true that you can't immediately say that those experiments will translate into human health, but nevertheless, it is obvious that having an understanding of human memory is going to be important for human health.

Common sense, proportionality, and judgment are the skills we must seek in those we choose to regulate our lives.

We're learning how infections are travelling around the world and, sadly, how cholera in Haiti was brought in by U.N. peacekeeping forces from south Asia.

The principle of treating cancer is to kill the abnormally dividing cells. Many drugs achieve this in a relatively unselective way, killing any cell that is dividing.

As a medical student in the 1970s, I was taught that the foundations of diagnosis and treatment were to take a detailed history and to perform a comprehensive clinical examination.

There is a particular set of values commonly associated with being professional. Experience, expertise, trustworthiness, wisdom, and good judgement are all attributes aspired to by senior professional people, be they doctors, engineers, lawyers, civil servants, or the clergy.

A computer, by definition, cannot be held accountable for anything because there is no mechanism to hold it to account, short of turning off the electricity supply or destroying the hardware. Only humans can be accountable.

In the case of health information, I spent twenty-five years practicing medicine, and I was all too familiar with the fact that information wasn't properly shared, so I wouldn't know exactly what was in the hospital records; patients would be lost. Computerization gives the opportunity to actually get the information much better.

No one likes doing primate experiments, but some research can only be done on monkeys.

The most dangerous infections of humans have always been those which have emerged from other species.

The Wellcome Trust will retain a level of financial flexibility which will enable us to react quickly to unexpected developments and new ideas.

Science, engineering, and technology discovers and invents new ways of doing things - but it doesn't dictate how we should do them.

People go on exploration; they're trying to find places that weren't known before. But it is an inevitable fact of research, as is in any other form of exploration of the unknown, that some people find they go down a dead end.

The European Parliament must send a clear sign that it recognises the importance of embryonic stem cell research.

A small number of people can make a lot of noise.

The problem of poor vision has gone unnoticed for too long - it's astounding that 700 years after glasses were first invented, there are still 2.5 billion people across the world without access to something as simple as eye screening or a pair of glasses.

Science is not finished until it is communicated.

My job is to advise politicians, elected officials, and government ministries of the best way to deal with important issues, both localized, national, and the grand challenges facing humanity.

The question is, are there useful things that we can do with the results of a genome sequence that would bring benefit? And the answer is, today, should the majority of people go and have their genome sequenced? Probably not. But are there particular circumstances in which genome sequencing is really helpful? Yes, there are.

It is important to recognise that, alongside the huge benefits that artificial intelligence offers, there are potential ethical issues associated with some uses.