8 Quotes by Harold Varmus

In our adventures, we have only seen our monsters more clearly and described his scales and fangs in new ways - ways that reveal a cancer cell to be. like Grendel, a distorted version of ourselves." -1989 Nobel Prize Speech, Cited in Siddhartha Mukherjee's Emperor of All Maladies

I found myself more interested in the physical brain than in the more elusive mind, more in the biochemistry and electrical impulses of nerve cells than in the thoughts and behaviors those cells presumably produced.

We suddenly have the global view, the view of the Earth from the moon, and it's pretty thrilling.

We know this is ethically sensitive territory, ... the prospects of benefit to living human beings ... are dramatic.

We were overwhelmed by the scientific community's response,

This is a watershed event in the history of biology. It is the first complete blueprint of a complex organism.

I hope this will change the city's image, and make people feel this is a place where biotech is and wants to be.

Clearly, there's tremendous untapped potential among the world's scientists to address diseases of the developing world.