the scientists

"In ten years, the complete 'Tree of Life' will be finished and we'll have a complete map of life's family history. Then we can begin to understand why certain life forms died out while others went on evolving."  Read more

"The new possibilities that will open up when we can routinely tailor material at the atomic level is something we can only speculate about for the moment..."  Read more

"We'll soon be able to combine this information with data at molecular level. And then, who knows? Perhaps we'll be able to identify exactly which genes make the flycatcher a... flycatcher!"  Read more

"There are still a number of problems we need to solve. Even if our work looks very promising, we still can't get all stem cells to develop into dopamine neurons. One important problem is to get rid of the small proportion of undifferentiated stem cells that continue to divide and could give rise to cancer."  Read more

"Myself, I'm most interested in the Earth's ability to deal with change and continue to develop, what we call resilience."  Read more

"In fact Linnaeus did something quite amazing for a priest's son over a hundred years before Darwin: he classified man among the animals. It was he who called man Homo sapiens."  Read more

"I'll never forget when I first saw the small poplars flowering in my lab. What takes decades in nature we'd managed in a few weeks. I remember my first thought was 'This just can't be true!'."  Read more

"My gut feeling is that this will be a decisive step towards being able to use molecules that 'build themselves' in practical applications. This would open up whole new possibilities."  Read more