Mark Walport

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“When you check into a hotel, they don't need to know your name and address; they just need to know that the bill will be paid. People should ask questions.”

“We clearly have to reduce harmful energy emissions. Everyone acknowledges we simply can't switch off fossil fuels overnight.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”