I don't view myself as a practitioner of a particular skill or method. I'm constantly looking at what's the most interesting problem that I could possibly work on. I really try to figure out what sort of scientist I need to be in order to solve the problem I'm interested in solving.
Much of contemporary science is really the length and shadow of the technology we apply.
The immune system constantly creates genes on the fly that are specific to the things that show up in the body. It's amazing.
The best types of problems are those that seem harder at first than when you think about it.
The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 per cent of the language.
I enjoyed mathematics from a very young age. At the beginning of college, I had this illusion, which was kind of silly in retrospect, that if I just understood math and physics and philosophy, I could figure out everything else from first principles.
It's so hard to figure out what's going on in biological systems. You just can't see them.
There was a period in my life when I was eating ramen non-stop. These days, less so. Once you have a kid, you end up eating a lot of foods with broccoli in them.
One of the central mysteries of biology is why the genome is largely identical from cell to cell, even though cells do different things.
My wife and I started a program called Bears Without Borders. We raise money and hire local artisans to make stuffed animals and distribute them in their communities.
