Craig Venter Quotes

I'm hoping that these next 20 years will show what we did 20 years ago in sequencing the first human genome, was the beginning of the health revolution that will have more positive impact in people's lives than any other health event in history.

Once we all have our genomes, some of these extremely rare diseases are going to be totally predictable.

When most people talk about biofuels, they talk about using oils or grease from plants.

When you think of all the things that are made from oil or in the chemical industry, if in the future we could find cells to replace most of those processes, the ideal way would be to do it by direct design.

I think I've achieved some good things; doing the first genome in history - my team on that was phenomenal and all the things they pulled together; writing the first genome with a synthetic cell; my teams at the Venter Institute, Human Longevity, and before that Celera.

'Bloomberg's, you know, for people who don't use the service, provides through the Internet - through specialized computers - information about the financial world. It's a very large data base. I think they have on the order of a billion dollars or more a year in revenue.

A lot of people spend their last decade of their lives in pain and misery combating disease.

I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me.

The fact that I have a risk genetically for Alzheimer's and blindness is not great news. But the reality is that any one of us will have dozens of these risks, and what we have to learn is how to deal with them.

How we understand our own selves and how we work with our DNA software has implications that will affect everything from vaccine development to new approaches to antibiotics, new sources of food, new sources of chemicals, even potentially new sources of energy.

Organisms in the ocean provide over 40 percent of the oxygen we breathe, and they're the major sink for capturing all the carbon dioxide we constantly release into the atmosphere.

Sailing is a big outlet for me.

Genomics are about individuals. It's about what's specific to you, not your siblings, not your parents - each of us is totally unique. We will only see that uniqueness by drilling down to the genetic code.

My greatest fear is not the abuse of technology but that we will not use it at all.

Moving forward in science is as much unwinding the distorted thinking of the past as it is putting a clearer idea on the table.

The chemistry from compounds in the environment is orders of magnitude more complex than our best chemists can produce.

I naively thought that we could have a molecular definition for life, come up with a set of genes that would minimally define life. Nature just refuses to be so easily quantified.

Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.

It appears that the human genome does indeed contain deserts, or large, gene-poor regions.

Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it's not a disease itself.

Everybody is looking for a naturally occurring algae that is going to be a miracle cell to save the world, and after a century of looking, people still haven't found it.

Even though people pretend that medical records are privileged information, anyone can already get their hands on them.

Human lifespan used to be 30 years, 25 years. But there's no basic, fundamental reason why it has to be short.

There have been lots of stories written about all the hype over getting the genome done and the letdown of not discovering lots of cures right after.

We know virtually all of the genes known to mammals. We do not know all of the combinations.

Traditional ways of distinguishing populations are irrelevant in terms of genetic code.

Knowing what your parents have gives you hints of things, but your genome is a totally unique combination of and interchange of DNA from your parents. There is no one else like you genetically.

I don't see any absolute biological limit on human age.

Is my science of a level consistent with other people who have gotten the Nobel? Yes.

I hope I'll be remembered for my scientific contribution to understanding life and human life.

It's very expensive to treat chronic diseases.

The day is not far off when we will be able to send a robotically controlled genome-sequencing unit in a probe to other planets to read the DNA sequence of any alien microbe life that may be there.

I've gotten some pretty nice awards. I'm having trouble finding places to put them all.

Fred Sanger was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.

If there is a race, it is one to bring the benefits of genomes to human therapeutics. We all want to get there. We all want people to have much more meaningful and productive lives as they age.

I am confident that life once thrived on Mars and may well still exist there today.

The leading edge of the best science in the world is being driven by private money, and investment money because of the scarcity of government money to do this. It's not only by far the best and most advanced science, we're driving the equation at Human Longevity that everyone else is beginning to follow as well.

Each part of our genome is unique. We would not be alive if there was not a single mathematical solution for our chromosomes. We would just be scrambled goo.

When I started my Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, I was told that it would be difficult to make a new discovery in biology because it was all known. It all seems so absurd now.

Transposons are just small pieces of DNA that randomly insert in the genetic code. And if they insert in the middle of the gene, they disrupt its function.

Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.

The interpretation of medicine today is 'do your clinical values fall within a normal range?' Everything in the globe right now is in the law of averages, which mean absolutely nothing to individuals.

For each gene in your genome, you quite often get a different version of that gene from your father and a different version from your mother. We need to study these relationships across a very large number of people.

Cells will die in minutes to days if they lack their genetic information system. They will not evolve, they will not replicate, and they will not live.

The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people's lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.

I've always been fascinated with adrenaline; it's saved my life more than once, and it's caused me to need it to save my life more than once. One of the most fascinating responses in human evolution, adrenaline sharpens your brain; it sharpens your responses.

People think genes are an absolute cause of traits. But the notion that the genome is the blueprint for humanity is a very bad metaphor. If you think we're hard-wired and deterministic, there should indeed be a lot more genes.

You can imagine: 99 percent of your experiments fail for one reason or another.

I have the modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry.

Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.

Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.

Science should be the most fun job on the planet. You get to ask questions about the world around you and go out and seek the answers. Not to have fun doing that is crazy.

I thought we'd just sequence the genome once and that would be sufficient for most things in people's lifetimes. Now we're seeing how changeable and adaptable it is, which is why we're surviving and evolving as a species.

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

Nobel prizes are very special prizes, and it would be great to get one.

That's the nice thing about the field of science - the test of time sorts out the truth.

Any virus that's been sequenced today - that genome can be made.

Most drugs work on only about a third of the population, they do no damage to another third, and the final third can have negative consequences.

Sailing is a big outlet for me. It's one of the key things I've been able to do by commingling science with sailing and my love of the sea. Also, I have several motorcycles, and I like to go on motorcycle trips.

Ethanol's not an ideal fuel.

I turned 65 last year, and each year I get more and more interested in human health. For most people it happens around age 50, but I've always been a slow learner. It's critical in terms of the cost of health care.

One of the fundamental discoveries I made about myself - early enough to make use of it - was that I am driven to seize life and to understand it. The motor that pushes me is propelled by more than scientific curiosity.

I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet.

Early on, when you're working in a new area of science, you have to think about all the pitfalls and things that could lead you to believe that you had done something when you hadn't, and, even worse, leading others to believe it.

I am not sure our brains and our psychologies are ready for immortality.

The gene 'klotho' was named after the Greek Fate purported to spin the thread of life, because it contributes to longevity.

I willed myself through a junior college to a university and, ultimately, a Ph.D.

I was a horrible student. I really hated school.

We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before.

Race has no genetic or scientific basis.

Accuracy in the genetic field will be essential. Errors in testing could be disastrous.

If I had a weak ego, and doubts about this, the first genome would not yet have been completed with US and UK government funding.

You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.

One of the things about genetics that has become clearer as we've done genomes - as we've worked our way through the evolutionary tree, including humans - is that we're probably much more genetic animals than we want to confess we are.

Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective.

It turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA - 30 to 50 letters in length - and it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are.

I've made money by just trying to do world-class science. That's the goal that we're setting at Celera. If we do world-class science and create new medicine paradigms, the money will more than follow at a corporate level and at a personal level.

I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry.

You cannot look at a person's genes and say with any accuracy whether they are from one racial group or another.

Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another.

Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our planet.

Mathematicians have been hiding and writing messages in the genetic code for a long time, but it's clear they were mathematicians and not biologists because, if you write long messages with the code that the mathematicians developed, it would more than likely lead to new proteins being synthesized with unknown functions.

I don't know if the optimists
or the pessimists are right.
But, the optimists are going to get something done.

In the past, geneticists have looked at so-called disease genes, but a lot of people have changes in their genes and don't get these diseases. There have to be other parts of physiology and genetics that compensate.

The rich agricultural nations are the ones that can adapt to the new biotechnologies.

Life is a DNA software system.

Space X's Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars with modules where earthlings can live. My teleporting technology is the number one way those individuals will get new information, new treatments of diseases that will occur on the planet, and new food sources.

We have 200 trillion cells, and the outcome of each of them is almost 100 percent genetically determined. And that's what our experiment with the first synthetic genome proves, at least in the case of really simple bacteria. It's the interactions of all those separate genetic units that give us the physiology that we see.

As a scientist, I clearly see the potential for harnessing the power of nature.

I've had a very unusual background in science - not the usual route of planning on being a scientist from age 3. I think my story shows that success is more about personal motivation and determination than it is about where you were born or what your economic status was.

The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.

My genetic autobiography can be found throughout my body.

I think from my experience in war and life and science, it all has made me believe that we have one life on this planet.

People are comprised of sets of DNA from each parent. If you looked at just the DNA from your father, it wouldn't tell you who you really are.

Synthetic biology can help address key challenges facing the planet and its population. Research in synthetic biology may lead to new things such as programmed cells that self-assemble at the sites of disease to repair damage.

Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.

The Anthropocentic Age - the first age in which humankind is the dominant species on the planet - cuts both ways: it is up to us to destroy or save the planet. We certainly have the ability.

We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.

There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people's lives.

A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.