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Craig Venter [1946-0] American

Rank: 101
Scientist, Geneticist

John Craig Venter is an American biotechnologist, biochemist, geneticist, and entrepreneur. He is known for being one of the first to sequence the human genome and the first to transfect a cell with a synthetic genome.

Design, Space, Environmental, Medical, Science, Age, Computers, Future, Home, Life, War

Quote	Tags	Rank
I see, in the future, bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use.	Future	101
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.	Space	102
Intellectual property is a key aspect for economic development.		103
I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.	Space	104
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.	Age, Home, War	105
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.		106
It appears that the human genome does indeed contain deserts, or large, gene-poor regions.		107
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.		108
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.	Design, Science	109
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.	Science	110
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.		111
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.		112
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.		113
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.		114
You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.		115
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.		116
I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me.		117
Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.	Design	118
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.		119
We can create new ways to create clean water.		120
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.		121
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.		122
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.		123
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.	Design	124
Human lifespan used to be 30 years, 25 years. But there's no basic, fundamental reason why it has to be short.		125
I am confident that life once thrived on Mars and may well still exist there today.		126
Life is a DNA software system.	Life	201
A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.		202
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.		203
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.		204
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.		205
The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.	Environmental	206
I've gotten some pretty nice awards. I'm having trouble finding places to put them all.		207
Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective.	Medical	208
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.		209
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.	Design	210
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.		211
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.		212
Nobel prizes are very special prizes, and it would be great to get one.		213
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.		214
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.		215
I think I'm a survivor. I could have suffered at least 100 professional deaths. I could come up with a list of the 100 times I've come closest to death, from having pneumonia as a child to car crashes.		216
I suppose if there's a set of genes I have, it's detesting authority.		217
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.		218
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.		219
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.		220
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.		221
The future of society is 100% dependent on scientific advances.		222
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.		223
I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet.		224
I was a horrible student. I really hated school.		225
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.		226
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.		301
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.		302
The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.		303
I hope I'll be remembered for my scientific contribution to understanding life and human life.		304
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.		305
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.		306
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.		307
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.		308
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.		309
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.		310
Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.	Design	311
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.		312
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.		313
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.		314
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.		315
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.		316
'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.	Computers	317
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.		318
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.		319
Companies, cities, and potentially even individuals could have a small refinery to make their own fuel.		320
You can't have life without the genetic code.		321
We can create new food substances.		322
You can imagine: 99 percent of your experiments fail for one reason or another.		323
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.		324
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.		325
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.		326
I willed myself through a junior college to a university and, ultimately, a Ph.D.		401
Fred Sanger was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.		402
Traditional ways of distinguishing populations are irrelevant in terms of genetic code.		403
You cannot look at a person's genes and say with any accuracy whether they are from one racial group or another.		404
We all evolved out of the same three or four groups in Africa, as black Africans.		405
There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people's lives.		406
Mitochondrial DNA is in higher concentration, lasts longer, and can be extracted from bones.		407
Race has no genetic or scientific basis.		408
Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.		409
I don't see any absolute biological limit on human age.		410
A lot of people spend their last decade of their lives in pain and misery combating disease.		411
I am not sure our brains and our psychologies are ready for immortality.		412
The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome.		413
As a scientist, I clearly see the potential for harnessing the power of nature.		414
There's a constant debate over nature or nurture - they're inseparable.		415
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.		416
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.		417
Even though people pretend that medical records are privileged information, anyone can already get their hands on them.	Medical	418
Accuracy in the genetic field will be essential. Errors in testing could be disastrous.		419
We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.		420
Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another.		421
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.		422
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.		423
There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA.		424
The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.		425
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.	Design	426
The photosynthesis we see with plants is not very efficient. Algaes are more efficient.		501
It's quite comforting to me as an individualist that we're not very close to being clones of one other.		502
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.		503
The chemistry from compounds in the environment is orders of magnitude more complex than our best chemists can produce.		504
I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry.	Environmental	505
Ethanol's not an ideal fuel.		506
Is my science of a level consistent with other people who have gotten the Nobel? Yes.		507
Life was so cheap in Vietnam. That is where my sense of urgency comes from.		508
My genetic autobiography can be found throughout my body.		509
The gene 'klotho' was named after the Greek Fate purported to spin the thread of life, because it contributes to longevity.		510
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.		511
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.		512
We know virtually all of the genes known to mammals. We do not know all of the combinations.		513
Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply.		514
We need 10,000 genomes, not 100, to start to understand the link between genetics, disease and wellness.		515
We have 100 genes or so, which we know we can't knock out without killing the cell, that are of unknown structure.		516
I spent 10 years trying to find one gene.		517
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.		518
If you have lung cancer, the most important thing you can know is your genetic code.		519
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.		520
Perfect pitch is genetic. It's 100% genetic.		521
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.		522
Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it's not a disease itself.		523
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.	Space	524
My greatest fear is not the abuse of technology but that we will not use it at all.		525
Once we all have our genomes, some of these extremely rare diseases are going to be totally predictable.		526
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.		601
It's very expensive to treat chronic diseases.		602
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.		603
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.		604
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.		605
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?		606
The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time.		607
Everybody is looking for a naturally occurring algae that is going to be a miracle cell to save the world, and after a century of looking, people still haven't found it.		608
There's a lot of what I call 'bio-babble' and hype out there from a lot of bioenergy companies.		609
Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our planet.		610
When most people talk about biofuels, they talk about using oils or grease from plants.		611
The rich agricultural nations are the ones that can adapt to the new biotechnologies.		612
There's not going to be any one replacement for oil: we need to have hundreds of solutions to this global issue.		613
We're a country of laws and rules, and the Supreme Court has ruled that life forms are patentable entities.		614
Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.		615
San Francisco is one of my favorite cities on the planet.		616
Sailing is a big outlet for me.		617
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.		618
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.		619
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.		620
As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.	Design	621
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.		622
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.		623
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.		624
That's the nice thing about the field of science - the test of time sorts out the truth.		625
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.		626
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.		701
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.		702
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.		703
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.		704
Our genomes are evolving and changing every single day.		705
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.		706
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.		707
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.		708

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