Erez Lieberman Aiden

I enjoyed mathematics from a very young age. At the beginning of college, I had this illusion, which was kind of silly in retrospect, that if I just understood math and physics and philosophy, I could figure out everything else from first principles. ”

One of the central mysteries of biology is why the genome is largely identical from cell to cell, even though cells do different things. ”

My wife and I started a program called Bears Without Borders. We raise money and hire local artisans to make stuffed animals and distribute them in their communities. ”

There was a period in my life when I was eating ramen non-stop. These days, less so. Once you have a kid, you end up eating a lot of foods with broccoli in them. ”

It's so hard to figure out what's going on in biological systems. You just can't see them. ”

The immune system constantly creates genes on the fly that are specific to the things that show up in the body. It's amazing. ”

Much of contemporary science is really the length and shadow of the technology we apply. ”

I don't view myself as a practitioner of a particular skill or method. I'm constantly looking at what's the most interesting problem that I could possibly work on. I really try to figure out what sort of scientist I need to be in order to solve the problem I'm interested in solving. ”