14 Quotes by Robert Waterston

I couldn't imagine Darwin hoping for a stronger confirmation of his ideas than what we see when we compare the human and chimp genomes.

I can't imagine Darwin hoping for a stronger confirmation of his ideas.

We've got the catalog, now we just have to figure it out. It's not going to be one gene. It's going to be an accumulation of changes.

We've got the catalog, now we just have to figure it out.

We have before us all the pieces of the puzzle that it takes to make a worm. Now we need to figure out how it works.

We're really looking at an individual evolutionary event, and this is spectacular.

When we look at chimpanzees . . . we get this extremely fine-grained view of evolution, and as a result we understand a lot more about the processes that are changing our own genome over time.

Reading these two genomes side by side, it's amazing to see the evolutionary changes that are occurring. I couldn't imagine (naturalist Charles) Darwin looking for stronger confirmation of his theories.

As our closest living evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees are especially suited to teach us about ourselves. We still do not have in our hands the answer to a most fundamental question: What makes us human? But this genomic comparison dramatically narrows the search for the key biological differences between the species.