Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Walport

If you look at my track record as government chief scientific advisor, I've always recognized that all of the sciences are important to all of research, and we need a balance.

Banks and credit agencies learn continuously about the purchases we make. This is convenient and diminishes the risk of theft. It also means that banks can know more about our lifestyle than our close relatives.

As a medical student in the 1970s, I was taught that the foundations of diagnosis and treatment were to take a detailed history and to perform a comprehensive clinical examination.

Sharing data allows us to research, communicate, consume media, buy and sell, play games, and more. In return, businesses develop products, scientists undertake research, and governments use data to enable voting, inform policies, collect tax, and provide better public services.

The principle of treating cancer is to kill the abnormally dividing cells. Many drugs achieve this in a relatively unselective way, killing any cell that is dividing.

Science is not finished until it is communicated.

People have extreme beliefs about whether it is right for humans to tamper with embryos in any way at all. Sometimes the values discussion gets conflated with the science discussion. We shouldn't pretend we're having an argument about science when we're having an argument about values.

Public trust is a vital condition for artificial intelligence to be used productively.

The most dangerous infections of humans have always been those which have emerged from other species.

The U.K. is fortunate in its geographical position. We're an island. But we are living in a completely interconnected world where disruptions in countries far away will have major impacts.

Research must be central to healthcare if healthcare is to improve.

I was always taught at medical school that you should never do a test unless you could do something with the result.

Living in areas with a high population density does not need to be synonymous with overcrowding. Manhattan has an extremely dense population and is considered by many to be a highly desirable place to live.

We need to show why the government should be funding science and how that funding delivers.

In the case of health information, I spent twenty-five years practicing medicine, and I was all too familiar with the fact that information wasn't properly shared, so I wouldn't know exactly what was in the hospital records; patients would be lost. Computerization gives the opportunity to actually get the information much better.

Science, engineering, and technology have transformed the infrastructure of the modern world and have a vital role to play at the heart of policy making.

We are extraordinarily lucky in the U.K. to have inherited a diverse range of cities that bear the imprints of many centuries of human habitation.

Climate change is happening, and humans are significant contributors, and that raises some really important policy questions.

It would be silly not to admit that there are some sections of the public who are unconvinced by the benefits or have doubts about the motives behind it. We have to be clear that GM is not all about profits for multinational companies.

It seems paradoxical that, as medical scientists make huge advances in discovering the mechanisms of common diseases, fewer and fewer innovative drugs are reaching the market.

I've never been a proponent of something monolithic.

People go on exploration; they're trying to find places that weren't known before. But it is an inevitable fact of research, as is in any other form of exploration of the unknown, that some people find they go down a dead end.

Forensic techniques are enormously useful in a wide range of fields outside the criminal justice system.

There is a particular set of values commonly associated with being professional. Experience, expertise, trustworthiness, wisdom, and good judgement are all attributes aspired to by senior professional people, be they doctors, engineers, lawyers, civil servants, or the clergy.

Henry Wellcome certainly was a talented character with a colorful and amazing personal story.

New technology creates a new marketplace of words, creating totally new words and changing the meaning and application of existing ones. In doing so, it has a potent opportunity to create new misconceptions and confusion.

If you look at U.K. science, we collaborate with people across the whole world, and it's extremely important we continue to do so in the future.

I look forward to working closely with the Research Councils, Innovate UK, and Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), as we work together to create UKRI. I also look forward to working closely with all of our research and innovation communities to provide a strong and coherent voice for U.K. science and innovation.

I am honoured to be appointed as the first chief executive of UKRI. My ambition is to make UKRI the world's leading research and innovation public funding agency.

Science can tell us what can be done in principle, but it is then a matter for public debate as to what should be done. And ultimately, it is a role for politicians to decide the answers.

We all want our drugs to be safe - and so an essential part of the pathway to the development of a new drug is approval by a regulator.

We may know the chemical structure of medicinal drugs, but we frequently have a very incomplete understanding of how they work.

Like Israel, the U.K. is a democracy, and like Israel, we would never want to muzzle political voices, whatever their opinions - and that is especially true for universities.

When governments work well, they safeguard citizens' health, well-being, resilience and security, and they increase prosperity. To do this, they must respond effectively to the new, the unexpected, and the game-changing.

Many families would like to avoid burdening future generations with inherited diseases such as haemophilia or severe developmental disorders. But most would think it wrong to edit the genes that influence the 'normal' range of human variation, from eye colour to intelligence or athletic ability.

When the correct tests are done, GM products are as safe as their non-GM counterparts.

It's been an enormous privilege to be the government chief scientific adviser.

It is a fiction to imagine that the haphazard paper chits of old are more private than the modern digital alternative. Paper records have always presented a security risk.

David Sainsbury has been good for science and good for innovation in the U.K. He has been an outstanding science minister and shown extraordinary passion and commitment to his portfolio.

Cities are central to the shaping and delivery of national policy objectives, and in return, they are the places where social, environmental, and economic policies play out in practice.

It was and has been one of the major interventions in public health, and it's absolutely vital that people vaccinate their children.

The European Parliament must send a clear sign that it recognises the importance of embryonic stem cell research.

Distributed ledgers are inherently harder to attack because instead of a single database, there are multiple shared copies of the same database, so a cyber stack would have to attack all the copies simultaneously to be successful.

A computer, by definition, cannot be held accountable for anything because there is no mechanism to hold it to account, short of turning off the electricity supply or destroying the hardware. Only humans can be accountable.

A small number of people can make a lot of noise.

In medicine, there is always a balance between risk and benefit.

Industrialisation, mass transit, and the Internet are technological revolutions that have reshaped lives, nations, and the planet.

My job is to advise politicians, elected officials, and government ministries of the best way to deal with important issues, both localized, national, and the grand challenges facing humanity.

The involvement of clinicians, researchers, and, most importantly, the thousands of people who have donated DNA samples will help us to correlate genetic variation with individual variation in health and disease and help to deliver on the long-term promise of the Human Genome Project.

Medical engineering is one of the areas in which the traditional 'silo' structures of university disciplines have not encouraged collaboration.

We pretend that the debate about genetically modified crops is a debate about science when the reality is, actually, that the science is very clear. It is really a debate about values.

An important task for government is to think about the future as well as to learn from the past, and the Foresight Programme, run by the Government Office for Science, helps in the development of this thinking.

The best approach to risk is to identify and manage it.

Science, engineering, and technology discovers and invents new ways of doing things - but it doesn't dictate how we should do them.

We take it for granted that because our shelves and supermarkets are heaving with food that there are no problems with food security. But we have limited land in the U.K., and climate disruption and population growth are putting pressure on food supply.

Forensic science offers great potential, as it draws on almost every discipline and, in doing so, creates widespread opportunity for innovation.

As medical data has such power to deliver better understanding of disease and better patient outcomes, it is important we find the best way of sharing it.

Distributed ledger technologies have the potential to help governments to collect taxes, deliver benefits, issue passports, record land registries, assure the supply chain of goods, and generally ensure the integrity of government records and services.

Common sense, proportionality, and judgment are the skills we must seek in those we choose to regulate our lives.

It is important to recognise that, alongside the huge benefits that artificial intelligence offers, there are potential ethical issues associated with some uses.