The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.
Why do we do basic research? To learn about ourselves.
We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.
Scientists tend to be skeptical, but the weakness of the community of science is that it tends to move into preformed establishment modes that say this is the only way of doing science, the only valid view.
By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and you stretch your own mind, and very often you learn something new.
The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.
I have the same sense of the power and virtue of knowledge that some people get from a religious background.
In 15 years we'll have all the sequence, a list of the genes everyone has in common and those that differ among people. We know only something like a tenth of 1 percent of the sequence at the moment.
Science doesn't in the slightest depend on trust. It depends completely on the belief that you can demonstrate something for yourself.
The interaction of the variation in our genes is what's responsible for lots of our attributes and vigor.
We haven't been able yet to determine in terms of genes what makes a human being a human and not another mammal.