Top 88 Craig Venter Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I was a horrible student. I really hated school.

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.

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.

My genetic autobiography can be found throughout my body.

Perfect pitch is genetic. It’s 100% genetic.

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

Race has no genetic or scientific basis.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Ethanol’s not an ideal fuel.

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.

‘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.

Life is a DNA software system.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.

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.

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 can create new ways to create clean water.

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