Quotes from Anne Wojcicki

All the kids from my nursery school are still in touch.

I have mothers with small children come to me and say, 'You found that I had early breast cancer - because of you, I don't have cancer.' You've just prevented that person from dying early, and to prevent an early, unnecessary death is incredibly meaningful.

There's a beauty in being unrealistic.

I had a very unusual childhood in that I grew up on the Stanford campus and I never moved.

I grew up with my mom being very, very cheap, so when it's free, I'm like, 'Oh my God, it's free - I have to take as much as I can!'

When you try new things, you will make mistakes. That's OK.

Once a week, I might stay late at work. It's sometimes very efficient to work until 7 P.M. - and then come home to kids who are clean and ready for bed. Those days are good.

I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about genetic information and what you can and cannot learn. One of the things we try to do is educate individuals that knowing information is empowering.

One of the things is, I don't read my own press. I never watch myself.

It's one of the things I want people to understand about science... You don't have to be the best person in the world at it. But you can be good, and there are so many different opportunities in science.

When Amazon emerged, people had these debates about whether people would put their credit cards online.

People want to be in charge of health information. They want it available the same way online banking is available.

In Silicon Valley, you want things done instantly.

Being in Silicon Valley makes me strict when it comes to my children's technology use. I am surrounded by it all day, so I try to avoid it when I get home. I set screen-time limits, because I think it's good to diversify activities.

Part of the beauty of Silicon Valley is that people generally encourage you to think crazy. It's the hypothesis that there's nothing sacred that can't be changed.

One of the things that got me interested in genetics was the relationship between genes and environment. We are all dealt a certain deck of cards, but our environment can influence the outcomes.

I really like raw connections, and so I've always had a harder time in politics because I feel there's a lot of veneer around everything.

I'm not going to change; I'm very stubborn in this way. I am what I am.

Traditionally, when you talk to people who have Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, they'll talk about how they're in five or six studies, and they've been sequenced by each study. That's just fat in the system. Just have a single data set that then you can share. You can make the entire system more efficient.

Pharma companies don't have a direct relationship with consumers, so they're always subjects.

One of the best aspects of health care reform is it starts to emphasize prevention.

If we can actually decrease the failure rate from nine out of 10 drugs failing in clinical trials and instead have seven out of 10 instead failing, that is a major victory for drug discovery and for people having better therapy.

When I was young, I ate Ho Hos every day.

My divorce wasn't fun.