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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I placed some of the DNA on the ends of my fingers and rubbed them together. The stuff was sticky. It began to dissolve on my skin. 'It's melting
like cotton candy.'
'Sure. That's the sugar in the DNA,' Smith said.
'Would it taste sweet?'
'No. DNA is an acid, and it's got salts in it. Actually, I've never tasted it.'
Later, I got some dried calf DNA. I placed a bit of the fluff on my tongue. It melted into a gluey ooze that stuck to the roof of my mouth in a blob. The blob felt slippery on my tongue, and the taste of pure DNA appeared. It had a soft taste, unsweet, rather bland, with a touch of acid and a hint of salt. Perhaps like the earth's primordial sea. It faded away.
Page 67, in Richard Preston's biographical essay on Craig Venter, "The Genome Warrior" (originally published in The New Yorker in 2000). — Timothy Ferris

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

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

Sailing is a big outlet for me. — Craig Venter

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

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

Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our planet. — Craig Venter

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

There's a constant debate over nature or nurture - they're inseparable. — Craig Venter

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

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. — 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

There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA. — 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

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

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. — 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

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 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. — Craig Venter

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

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. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

I spent 10 years trying to find one gene. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

Intellectual property is a key aspect for economic development. — Craig Venter

The future of society is 100% dependent on scientific advances. — 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

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. — 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

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

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

Ethanol's not an ideal fuel. — Craig Venter

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. — Craig Venter

Darwin didn't walk around the Galapagos and come up with the theory of evolution. He was exploring, collecting, making observations. It wasn't until he got back and went through the samples that he noticed the differences among them and put them in context. — Craig Venter

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

It's quite comforting to me as an individualist that we're not very close to being clones of one other. — Craig Venter

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. — 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

Companies, cities, and potentially even individuals could have a small refinery to make their own fuel. — Craig Venter

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

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. — 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

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

There's not going to be any one replacement for oil: we need to have hundreds of solutions to this global issue. — Craig Venter

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. — 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

Elon is one of the few people that I feel is more accomplished than I am," said Craig Venter, the man who decoded the human genome and went on to create synthetic lifeforms. At some point he hopes to work with Musk on a type of DNA printer that could be sent to Mars. It would, in theory, allow humans to create medicines, food, and helpful microbes for early settlers of the planet. "I think biological teleportation is what is going to truly enable the colonization of space," he said. "Elon and I have been talking about how this might play out. — Ashlee Vance

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

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. — Craig Venter

Hunger is the teacher of the arts and the bestower of invention. -Magister artis ingenique largitor Venter — Aulus Persius Flaccus

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

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

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. — 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

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. — 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

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

Show me a highly successful person in any field that has gotten there having a weak ego. You have to believe in yourself, and you have to believe in what you're doing. — Craig Venter

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

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

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. — Craig Venter

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

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. — 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

Preventative medicine has to be the direction we go in. For example, if colon cancer is detected early - because a person knew he had a genetic risk and was having frequent exams - the surgery is relatively inexpensive and average survival is far greater than 10 years. — Craig Venter

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

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