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I knew a little molecular biology, but I had no notion of what you could do experimentally. It reminded me of electronics, the idea that you had these tools to splice things together in an ordered way, that you could reengineer things in the cell to do something else. --Mark Goulian

"Nothing panned out for years, but [the techniques] did come to fruition. You have to make the investment." --Andrea Ghez

"People refer to those things as their mistakes, but I think it's more accurate to say that they help to reduce choices and align the [company's] direction with the right path." --Jon Kayyem

"As soon as some conference deadline comes up, you see us working like maniacs to finish … papers, just like we did when we were in school." --Henrique Malvar, the director of Microsoft's Redmond research lab

"There isn't a pharmaceutical company that doesn't want these people. [Fellowship participants] are getting calls from headhunters 6 months or a year before they've finished." --Dave Flockhart, professor of medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine

"This is an environment where everyone is considered and assumed to be a responsible, engaged adult until proven otherwise. You do what you have to do to get the job done." -Holly Butler

"If some significant fraction of the NIH budget is going to large-scale projects, and a substantial fraction of each project's budget goes into informatics, that translates into a lot of jobs." --David States, professor of bioinformatics, University of Washington

You don't have to pay any of the money back, the government won't ask for equity in your business, and you keep full control of the intellectual property that you develop. Venture investors--if you can find any--will not be so kind.

In 2000, NSF received about 3000 computer science proposals with a success rate of 30%. In 2004, the number of applications had risen to 6500 and the success rate had dropped to 16%.