Top 100 Craig Venter Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Once we all have our genomes, some of these extremely rare diseases are going to be totally predictable.
Craig Venter
#4. The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.
Craig Venter
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.
Craig Venter
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. The gene 'klotho' was named after the Greek Fate purported to spin the thread of life, because it contributes to longevity.
Craig Venter
#12. 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
#13. The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time.
Craig Venter
#14. Every single cancer is a genetic disease. Not necessarily inherited from your parents, but it's genetic changes which cause cancer. So as we sequence the genomes of tumours and compare those to the sequence of patients, we're getting down to the fundamental basis of each individual person's cancer.
Craig Venter
#15. 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
#16. I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me.
Craig Venter
#17. 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.
Craig Venter
#18. The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.
Craig Venter
#19. I am not sure our brains and our psychologies are ready for immortality.
Craig Venter
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. The future of society is 100% dependent on scientific advances.
Craig Venter
#24. The photosynthesis we see with plants is not very efficient. Algaes are more efficient.
Craig Venter
#25. As a scientist, I clearly see the potential for harnessing the power of nature.
Craig Venter
#26. There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA.
Craig Venter
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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.
Craig Venter
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.
Craig Venter
#34. 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
#35. 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.
Craig Venter
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Traditional ways of distinguishing populations are irrelevant in terms of genetic code.
Craig Venter
#39. Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it's not a disease itself.
Craig Venter
#40. 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
#41. Mitochondrial DNA is in higher concentration, lasts longer, and can be extracted from bones.
Craig Venter
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. I am confident that life once thrived on Mars and may well still exist there today.
Craig Venter
#45. You can imagine: 99 percent of your experiments fail for one reason or another.
Craig Venter
#46. We can create new ways to create clean water.
Craig Venter
#47. Companies, cities, and potentially even individuals could have a small refinery to make their own fuel.
Craig Venter
#48. The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome.
Craig Venter
#49. 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
#50. We all evolved out of the same three or four groups in Africa, as black Africans.
Craig Venter
#51. We need 10,000 genomes, not 100, to start to understand the link between genetics, disease and wellness.
Craig Venter
#52. 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
#53. There's a constant debate over nature or nurture - they're inseparable.
Craig Venter
#54. I don't see any absolute biological limit on human age.
Craig Venter
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. You cannot look at a person's genes and say with any accuracy whether they are from one racial group or another.
Craig Venter
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Is my science of a level consistent with other people who have gotten the Nobel? Yes.
Craig Venter
#63. 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
#64. You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.
Craig Venter
#65. 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
#66. 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.
Craig Venter
#67. I've gotten some pretty nice awards. I'm having trouble finding places to put them all.
Craig Venter
#68. I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet.
Craig Venter
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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.
Craig Venter
#72. 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
#74. 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
#75. '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.
Craig Venter
#76. Our genomes are evolving and changing every single day.
Craig Venter
#77. My genetic autobiography can be found throughout my body.
Craig Venter
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. If you have lung cancer, the most important thing you can know is your genetic code.
Craig Venter
#82. 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
#83. Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.
Craig Venter
#84. 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
#85. I see, in the future, bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use.
Craig Venter
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. The rich agricultural nations are the ones that can adapt to the new biotechnologies.
Craig Venter
#89. You can't have life without the genetic code.
Craig Venter
#90. 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
#91. It appears that the human genome does indeed contain deserts, or large, gene-poor regions.
Craig Venter
#92. We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.
Craig Venter
#93. The same oil that gets burned as fuel is also the entire basis for the petrochemical industries, so our clothing, our plastics and our pharmaceuticals all come from oil and its derivatives.
Craig Venter
#94. Accuracy in the genetic field will be essential. Errors in testing could be disastrous.
Craig Venter
#95. Human lifespan used to be 30 years, 25 years. But there's no basic, fundamental reason why it has to be short.
Craig Venter
#96. Nobel prizes are very special prizes, and it would be great to get one.
Craig Venter
#97. My greatest fear is not the abuse of technology but that we will not use it at all.
Craig Venter
#98. When most people talk about biofuels, they talk about using oils or grease from plants.
Craig Venter
#99. 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
#100. 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
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