| Social/Economic Well-Being |
 |
| Individual/Humanity Well-Being |
|
| World Environmental Well-Being |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
Dr. Takeda, thank you very much for your
kind introduction. As Mike said, genomics is a team sport and
I am delighted to accept this award on behalf of the teams both
at the Institute for Genomic Research but also at Celera Genomics
where we sequenced first the microbes at TIGR and then the Drosophila
genome, human and mouse genomes, at Celera.
I'm particularly delighted to be sharing this award with Dr. Michael Hunkapiller for, if it was not for his work in developing new instrumentation, none of us, public or private, would have been able to sequence the human genome, and so without the new tools the science clearly would not have moved forward.
This award is, in part, for entrepreneurship and risk taking. I left the National Institutes of Health to form, and not for-profit ,the Institute for Genomic Research, and it was only through having a private endowment in this institute that we were in fact able to sequence the first free living organism genome in history. The whole genome shotgun method was, in fact, developed because we had independent funds when the government would not fund this work.
The formation of Celera in 1998 required about 350 million dollars in a risk capital investment, not your normal investment. I actually learned early on in my career while a medical corpsman in 1967-1968 in Da Nang, Vietnam, that if you risk nothing you accomplish nothing. My success has been due, in part, to a healthy balance of risk taking together with building the best scientific teams ever put together and a dose of some good ideas.
I actually hope to follow Dr. Takeda's promotion and support of scientific excellence by donating this award to the Venter-Fraser Foundation which supports scientific and key sociological endeavors.
Thank you very much. |
|
 |
|
