Top 100 Venter Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Hunger is the teacher of the arts and the bestower of invention. -Magister artis ingenique largitor Venter
Aulus Persius Flaccus
#3. Companies, cities, and potentially even individuals could have a small refinery to make their own fuel.
Craig Venter
#4. A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.
Craig Venter
#5. We can create new ways to create clean water.
Craig Venter
#6. I hope I'll be remembered for my scientific contribution to understanding life and human life.
Craig Venter
#7. The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.
Craig Venter
#8. Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective.
Craig Venter
#9. You can imagine: 99 percent of your experiments fail for one reason or another.
Craig Venter
#10. 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
#11. I am confident that life once thrived on Mars and may well still exist there today.
Craig Venter
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Mitochondrial DNA is in higher concentration, lasts longer, and can be extracted from bones.
Craig Venter
#15. 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
#16. Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it's not a disease itself.
Craig Venter
#17. Traditional ways of distinguishing populations are irrelevant in terms of genetic code.
Craig Venter
#18. Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.
Craig Venter
#19. Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.
Craig Venter
#20. Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.
Craig Venter
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another.
Craig Venter
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. I don't see any absolute biological limit on human age.
Craig Venter
#35. 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
#36. There's a constant debate over nature or nurture - they're inseparable.
Craig Venter
#37. 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
#38. We need 10,000 genomes, not 100, to start to understand the link between genetics, disease and wellness.
Craig Venter
#39. Perfect pitch is genetic. It's 100% genetic.
Craig Venter
#40. It's quite comforting to me as an individualist that we're not very close to being clones of one other.
Craig Venter
#41. 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
#42. I don't know if the optimists
or the pessimists are right.
But, the optimists are going to get something done.
Craig Venter
#43. There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people's lives.
Craig Venter
#45. 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
#46. We all evolved out of the same three or four groups in Africa, as black Africans.
Craig Venter
#47. 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
#48. 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.
Craig Venter
#49. Each part of our genome is unique. We would not be alive if there was not a single mathematical solution for our chromosomes. We would just be scrambled goo.
Craig Venter
#50. 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
#51. The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome.
Craig Venter
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. I suppose if there's a set of genes I have, it's detesting authority.
Craig Venter
#57. I've made money by just trying to do world-class science. That's the goal that we're setting at Celera. If we do world-class science and create new medicine paradigms, the money will more than follow at a corporate level and at a personal level.
Craig Venter
#58. 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
#59. Any virus that's been sequenced today - that genome can be made.
Craig Venter
#60. The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time.
Craig Venter
#61. 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
#62. The gene 'klotho' was named after the Greek Fate purported to spin the thread of life, because it contributes to longevity.
Craig Venter
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. We're a country of laws and rules, and the Supreme Court has ruled that life forms are patentable entities.
Craig Venter
#68. 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
#69. I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.
Craig Venter
#70. 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
#71. 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
#73. The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.
Craig Venter
#74. Once we all have our genomes, some of these extremely rare diseases are going to be totally predictable.
Craig Venter
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. As a scientist, I clearly see the potential for harnessing the power of nature.
Craig Venter
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our planet.
Craig Venter
#87. There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA.
Craig Venter
#88. I have the modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry.
Craig Venter
#89. I willed myself through a junior college to a university and, ultimately, a Ph.D.
Craig Venter
#90. The photosynthesis we see with plants is not very efficient. Algaes are more efficient.
Craig Venter
#92. It's very expensive to treat chronic diseases.
Craig Venter
#93. We have trouble feeding, providing fresh, clean water, medicines, fuel for the six and a half billion. It's going to be a stretch to do it for nine.
Craig Venter
#94. The future of society is 100% dependent on scientific advances.
Craig Venter
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. I am not sure our brains and our psychologies are ready for immortality.
Craig Venter
#98. The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.
Craig Venter
#99. 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
#100. I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me.
Craig Venter
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