Craig Venter Quotations

I see, in the future, bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use.

I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.

Intellectual property is a key aspect for economic development.

We can do genetics. We can do experiments on fruit flies. We can do experiments on yeast. It's not so easy to do experiments on humans. So, in fact, it helps us, to interpret our own genetic code, to have the genetic code of the other species.

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

Even with seemingly simple things like eye color, you can't tell from my genetic code whether I have blue eyes or not. So it's naive to think that complex human behaviors, like risk-seeking, are driven by changes in one or two genes.

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.

Most people don't realize it, because they're invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earth's biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass.

Sometime in the future, I am a hundred percent certain scientists will sit down at a computer terminal, design what they want the organism to do, and build it.

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

We have trouble feeding, providing fresh, clean water, medicines, fuel for the six and a half billion. It's going to be a stretch to do it for nine.

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.

People equate patents with secrecy, that secrecy is what patents were designed to overcome. That's why the formula for Coca-Cola was never patented. They kept it as a trade secret, and they've outlasted patent laws by 80 years or more.

If I could change the science system, my prescription for changing the whole thing would be organising it around big goals and building teams to do it.

Since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast into space in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth. Whether there is any creature out there capable of making sense of the instructions in my genome, well, that's another question.

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

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

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

We can create new ways to create clean water.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA.

We're a country of laws and rules, and the Supreme Court has ruled that life forms are patentable entities.

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

Mitochondrial DNA is in higher concentration, lasts longer, and can be extracted from bones.

My genetic autobiography can be found throughout my body.

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.

One important part of scientific training is that scientists learn the boundaries, the safety issues, how to properly deal with and dispose of chemicals and reagents.

My early years were hardly a model of focus, discipline, and direction. No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries. No one could have predicted the arc of my career.

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

Now that we can read and write the genetic code, put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life, it will be possible to speed up biological evolution to the pace of social evolution.

People want to protect the territory that they have, and they're very threatened by change. That's not true for all of scientists, but you know, fortunately, the scientific community moves forward in a conservative fashion.

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

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.

I have a blend of klotho gene variants that have been linked with a lower risk for coronary artery disease and stroke and an advantage in longevity.

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

If anything, we've learned that we don't think this data's going to be as deterministic as was previously thought, ... There is even more need for this legislation until science catches up with our collective ignorance.

The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.

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.

There are still so many questions to answer about the workings of the human body and, most mysterious of all, it is influenced by our state of mind.

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 was a horrible student. I really hated school.

I was a surf bum wannabe. I left home at age 17 and moved to Southern California to try to take up surfing as a vocation, but this was in 1964, and there was this nasty little thing called the Vietnam War. As a result, I got drafted.

Life was so cheap in Vietnam. That is where my sense of urgency comes from.

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

I wrote an editorial piece in 'Science' about the nightly data release and how I thought it was bad for science as a field, I think a few years before Celera was formed.

I suppose if there's a set of genes I have, it's detesting authority.

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.

Right now, oil is being isolated around the globe, and there is a major effort in shipping, trucking and otherwise transporting that oil around to a very finite number of refineries. Biology allows us to make these same fuels in a much more distributed fashion.

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.

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

Part of the problem with the discovery of the so-called breast-cancer genes was that physicians wrongly told women that had the genetic changes associated with the genes that they had a 99% chance of getting breast cancer. Turns out all women that have these genetic changes don't get breast cancer.

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 think I'm a survivor. I could have suffered at least 100 professional deaths. I could come up with a list of the 100 times I've come closest to death, from having pneumonia as a child to car crashes.

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

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.

My complaint is that there are more books and news articles than there are primary scientific papers. I am probably the biggest critic of the hypesters, because it's dangerous when fields get overhyped.

We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology.

We need 10,000 genomes, not 100, to start to understand the link between genetics, disease and wellness.

We have 100 genes or so, which we know we can't knock out without killing the cell, that are of unknown structure.

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.

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

The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time.

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

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

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.

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

Traditional autobiography has generally had a poor press. The novelist Daphne du Maurier condemned all examples of this literary form as self-indulgent. Others have quipped that autobiography reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

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.

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

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

It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum.

We have learned nothing from the genome.

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

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. We have one chance to live it and to contribute to the future of society and the future of life. The only "afterlife" is what other people remember of you.

You can't just live in a comfortable little suburban neighborhood and get your education from movies and television and have any perspective on life.

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

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

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

We said that once we had finished sequencing the genome we would make it available to the scientific community for free, ... And we will be doing that on Monday morning at 10am.

The photosynthesis we see with plants is not very efficient. Algaes are more efficient.

When you do cross-breeding of plants, you're doing this blind experiment where you're just mixing DNA of different types of cells and just seeing what comes out of it.

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

We all evolved out of the same three or four groups in Africa, as black Africans.

We can now diagnose diseases that haven't even manifested in the patient, and may not until the fifth decade of life - if at all.

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

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.

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.

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

'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.

As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.

Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our 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.