Top 173 Quotes & Sayings by Craig Venter
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American scientist Craig Venter.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
The chemistry from compounds in the environment is orders of magnitude more complex than our best chemists can produce.
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.
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.
We can create new ways to create clean water.
Mitochondrial DNA is in higher concentration, lasts longer, and can be extracted from bones.
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.
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.
I've gotten some pretty nice awards. I'm having trouble finding places to put them all.
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.
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.
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.
A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.
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.
There's a constant debate over nature or nurture - they're inseparable.
I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry.
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.
The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time.
Race has no genetic or scientific basis.
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.
Intellectual property is a key aspect for economic development.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.
Nobel prizes are very special prizes, and it would be great to get one.
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.
You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.
Once we all have our genomes, some of these extremely rare diseases are going to be totally predictable.
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.
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.
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.
I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet.
The future of society is 100% dependent on scientific advances.
Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective.
There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people's lives.
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.
I am not sure our brains and our psychologies are ready for immortality.
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.
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.
Even though people pretend that medical records are privileged information, anyone can already get their hands on them.
I suppose if there's a set of genes I have, it's detesting authority.
The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.
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.
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.
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.
Life is a DNA software system.
Sailing is a big outlet for me.
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.
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.
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.
Related Authors
Austin O'Malley Quotes
American
Scientist
Carl Sagan Quotes
American
Scientist
Charles Darwin Quotes
English
Scientist
E. O. Wilson Quotes
American
Scientist
Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
German
Scientist
Isaac Asimov Quotes
American
Scientist
Jane Goodall Quotes
English
Scientist
Margaret Mead Quotes
American
Scientist
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
Lebanese
Scientist
Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes
American
Scientist
Richard Dawkins Quotes
English
Scientist
Stephen Jay Gould Quotes
American
Scientist
Steven Pinker Quotes
Canadian
Scientist
Sylvia Earle Quotes
American
Scientist
Thomas Huxley Quotes
English
Scientist
W. Edwards Deming Quotes
American
Scientist