Michael Specter:

The planet is in danger, and nature needs help.

Craig Venter:

It should be possible to assemble any combination of synthetic and natural DNA segments in any desired order.

Specter on Venter's comment:

That may turn out to be one of the most understated asides in the history of science.

What sorts of risk does that bring into play, and what sorts of opportunity?

Decius:

I've always been a believer that the answer to bad speech is better speech.

Jay Keasling:

We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us.

From The World in 2009:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."

Tom Knight:

Biology is the nanotechnology that works.

Kent Campbell:

This is not theoretical. This is real.

Richard Hamming:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

Freeman Dyson:

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

In the post-Darwinian era, biotechnology will be domesticated. There will be biotech games for children, played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen.

From the pen of Natalie Dee:

Real Egg 1: What is going to happen to us when our chickens come out?

Real Egg 2: I don't know, man. I don't know.

Drew Endy:

My guess is that our ultimate solution to the crisis of health-care costs will be to redesign ourselves so that we don't have so many problems to deal with.

Jeff Goldblum, in Jurassic Park:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Drew Endy:

We are surfing an exponential now, and, even for people who pay attention, surfing an exponential is a really tricky thing to do. And when the exponential you are surfing has the capacity to impact the world in such a fundamental way, in ways we have never before considered, how do you even talk about that?

Julian Schnabel:

Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.