Quotes from Leroy Hood

I didn't want my genome to be sequenced by any of the companies that were out there doing the partial sequences just from the point of view of commercialisation.

Cloning interferon was not something I wanted to get into.

The wellness and prevention market will outgrow the health care market.

If you look at healthcare today, it's all about disease. It's not about understanding wellness at all.

Your genome sequence will become a vital part of your medical record, thereby providing critical information about how to optimize your wellness.

If you know the mother's genome and the father's genome, and you see that the children have some genes that neither parent has, then you know that difference is either a mutation or a processing error.

My fundamental philosophy is that you owe it to society to transfer to them any knowledge you have that might be useful.

In the late 1970s, when I was a professor at Caltech, I pioneered four instruments for analyzing genes and proteins that revolutionized modern biology - and one of these, the automated DNA sequencer, enabled the Human Genome Project.

Each form of Alzheimer's disease should perturb different brain networks and so influence the concentration of different proteins that can be measured in the blood.

Changing the world is not easy, but its pursuit will change you profoundly.

Don't listen to the prevailing majority points of view. If you have new ideas, push them.

The systems approach to biology will be the dominant theme in medicine.

Life is a process of evolution and anyone who thinks the current world order is OK does not get what evolution is all about.

I have good genes, and I also do lots of exercises.

The Human Genome Project has given us a genetic parts list.

Don't underestimate the power of your vision to change the world. Whether that world is your office, your community, an industry or a global movement, you need to have a core belief that what you contribute can fundamentally change the paradigm or way of thinking about problems.

We don't argue if drug companies create drugs that can cure humans and charge lots of money for them, even though we all have these diseases. It will be pretty hard to make a different argument for genes.

Many nonprofits rely on grants alone.

To manipulate the immune system, you need to find the key bottlenecks that govern the system. The T-cell is an absolute bottleneck.

In the end, what counts is what you do.

The major thing is to view biology as an information science.

What you need to learn how to do is analyze situations and do differential diagnoses and understand the principle and the concepts rather than learn all the details, and medical school doesn't begin to do that.

I think the real problem is it's easy to persuade young kids of particular kinds of ideas, because they are flexible.

If you go to the FDA with a drug that's only meant to treat 50 people, and it's a 95 percent cure rate, you'll get your drug approved.