Craig Venter Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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. — Craig Venter

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

Perfect pitch is genetic. It's 100% genetic. — Craig Venter

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

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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

You can't have life without the genetic code. — Craig Venter

The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome. — Craig Venter

I somewhat joke that I know an awful lot because I learn from my mistakes. I just make a lot of mistakes. It's OK to fail in science just as long as you have the successes to go with the failures. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

Our genomes are evolving and changing every single day. — Craig Venter

Sailing is a big outlet for me. — Craig Venter

People think they're making individual decisions for themselves and their family not to get vaccinated. It's not just an individual choice - you're a hazard to society. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

We can create new food substances. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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

Life is a DNA software system. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

We can create new ways to create clean water. — Craig Venter

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

Creating life at the speed of light is part of a new industrial revolution. Manufacturing will shift from centralised factories to a distributed, domestic manufacturing future, thanks to the rise of 3D printer technology. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

If you have lung cancer, the most important thing you can know is your genetic code. — Craig Venter

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

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

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

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

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. — Craig Venter

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

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

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. — Craig Venter

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

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

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

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

I have the modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry. — Craig Venter

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

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

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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

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

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

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

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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

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

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. — Craig Venter

People think that Celera's trying to patent the whole human genome because it's been used as - I guess people in Washington learn how to do political attacks, and so it gets used as a political weapon, not as a factual one. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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

I was a horrible student. I really hated school. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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

Race has no genetic or scientific basis. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

One of the challenges with a government health system, like in the UK, with all of this data, is that you have a government making decisions on which treatments they'll pay for and which ones they won't. That's a dangerous, dangerous, place to get into society. — Craig Venter

Ethanol's not an ideal fuel. — Craig Venter

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

There's a lot of what I call 'bio-babble' and hype out there from a lot of bioenergy companies. — Craig Venter

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

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. — Craig Venter

The Janus-like nature of innovation - its responsible use and so on - was evident at the very birth of human ingenuity, when humankind first discovered how to make fire on demand. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

We have learned nothing from the genome. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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

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. — Craig Venter

It takes 10 kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef, 15 liters of water to get one kilogram of beef, and those cows produce a lot of methane. Why not get rid of the cows? — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

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

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter