Quotes from Mark Walport

We may know the chemical structure of medicinal drugs, but we frequently have a very incomplete understanding of how they work.

Medical engineering is one of the areas in which the traditional 'silo' structures of university disciplines have not encouraged collaboration.

We pretend that the debate about genetically modified crops is a debate about science when the reality is, actually, that the science is very clear. It is really a debate about values.

Many families would like to avoid burdening future generations with inherited diseases such as haemophilia or severe developmental disorders. But most would think it wrong to edit the genes that influence the 'normal' range of human variation, from eye colour to intelligence or athletic ability.

The involvement of clinicians, researchers, and, most importantly, the thousands of people who have donated DNA samples will help us to correlate genetic variation with individual variation in health and disease and help to deliver on the long-term promise of the Human Genome Project.

One has to understand the functioning of the normal brain before studying the badly malfunctioning brain.