Craig Venter
Craig Venter
John Craig Venteris an American biotechnologist, biochemist, geneticist, and entrepreneur. He is known for being one of the first to sequence the human genome and the first to transfect a cell with a synthetic genome. Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Researchand the J. Craig Venter Institute, and is now CEO of Human Longevity Inc. He was listed on Time magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth14 October 1946
CountryUnited States of America
The trouble is the field of science, medicine, universities, biotech companies - you name it - have been so splintered, layers, sub-divided, hacked that people can spend their entire career studying one tiny little cog of life.
You can't have life without the genetic code.
Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply.
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.
In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.
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.
If you have lung cancer, the most important thing you can know is your genetic code.
Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.
Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.
I don't see any absolute biological limit on human age.
I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet.
I hope I'll be remembered for my scientific contribution to understanding life and human life.
The chemistry from compounds in the environment is orders of magnitude more complex than our best chemists can produce.
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.