Never fight bigger boys or dogs.

The cost of DNA sequencing is going to change the world much faster than I would have thought. We can resequence someone now for $150,000. Can you reach the $1,000 genome? I'm skeptical of that. But just $15,000 would change the world. You'd do a thousand Greeks and a thousand Swedes and find out what's different about them. Anytime a child has problems at school or something where you worry something is wrong, you'll do a DNA diagnosis.

I've given my DNA to two of these companies. I've told them they can publish everything except the structure of the gene that will tell me if I'm predisposed to Alzheimer's. I don't want to know.

New ideas require new facts.

You explain things by way of ideas. Why do we have a government that is run by rich trash? Because they've used their money to buy the presidency. Bush is a tool for the people who don't want an inheritance tax. And Frist isn't an innocent bystander, with his own family fortune -- hundreds of millions. The piece of shit, I hate him.

For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change the world for the better.

I'm basically a libertarian. I don't want to restrict anyone from doing anything unless it's going to harm me. I don't want to pass a law stopping someone from smoking. It's just too dangerous. You lose the concept of a free society. Since we are genetically so diverse and our brains are so different, we're going to have different aspirations. The things that will satisfy me won't satisfy you. On the other hand, if global warming is in any way preventable and it's likely to come, not doing something would be irresponsible to the future of our society.

Should you be allowed to make an anti-Semitic remark? Yes, because some anti-Semitism is justified. Just like some anti-Irish feeling is justified. If you can't be criticized, that's very dangerous. The whole Larry Summers thing, to say that men are a bit strange and their strangest quality is their ability to understand mathematics -- you're not supposed to even think it.

I turned against the left wing because they don't like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.

I've wondered why people aren't more intelligent. Why isn't everyone as intelligent as Ashkenazi Jews? And it may be that societies work best when there's a mixture of abilities -- the bright people would never be an army. Or has our intelligence been limited by leaders killing off any potential competitors? I suspect time is not a factor. The Ashkenazi Jews have done it in a thousand years. So these are the sorts of things we'll find out -- how many mutations would you need to be more intelligent?

I went to a meeting on genetic enhancement in New York City, and a few of us were for it. The rest were appalled. To me, that's just a defensive reaction of people on the top -- they're afraid someone else might be on the top. But what if you were really dumb? Wouldn't it be nice to have a child who would let you get out of the slums? If you could make people with ten-point-higher IQs, we'd probably have fewer wars.

Francis Crick said we should pay poor people not to have children. I think now we're in a terrible situation where we should pay the rich people to have children. If there is any correlation between success and genes, IQ will fall if the successful people don't have children. These are self-obvious facts.

I've seen no evidence of a god, so I'm not going to think about one.

Being raised nonreligious made you free. You could look at the evidence. Whether being nonreligious or a Democrat was more important, I can't tell you.

If I had been married earlier in life, I wouldn't have seen the double helix. I would have been taking care of the kids on Saturday. On the other hand, I was lonely a lot of the time.

I like writing good sentences. In the minimum amount of space, you get the maximum amount of information. So when people ask me what I can still do, I say I finished this essay and I wrote every word of it and I'm seventy-eight. I haven't lost my ability to know what a crappy sentence is.

Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind.

Published in the January 2007 issue.

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