"What I am thinking might be happening here is not that people have been infected for some time with this (SARS-CoV-2) virus, but that it is finding a new niche rather more slowly and that could ultimately cause more of a problem than we have seen with other diseases because it is not so spectacular early on in its evolution."

"It (travel restriction for the Chinese people due to the COVID-19 pandemic) has never been done before, there is no evidence this will do anything by shutting these people in. There is still the virus there."

"We need to get a better idea of how many people are discharged from hospital and a better understanding of how many mild cases have been missed (from this COVID-19), while we focused on more severe disease (until this moment (3 February 2020)). When we find that out will depend on China giving us more details, because that's where most cases are, and so far, a decent number of cases outside of China have not seemed as severe."

"I can see no hope at present of such a vaccine being produced... I have adopted a frankly defeatist attitude towards the problem of poliomyelitis and I hope that future developments will prove me wrong... No means of controlling poliomyelitis is at present visible."

"I can see no practical application of molecular biology to human affairs... DNA is a tangled mass of linear molecules in which the informational content is quite inaccessible."

"One of the minor regrets, not really a big regret, is that I’ve never published a paper with Mac Burnet. I’ve published 500 papers, not a single one has Burnet as a co-author. He did not believe in putting his name on a paper if he hadn’t done at least one third of the work himself. A sort of an honest unselfish approach, when it comes time to reap the glory you do it without having someone grabbing it instead of you."