Top 173 Quotes & Sayings by Craig Venter - Page 2

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

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.

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.

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.

'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.

I was a horrible student. I really hated school.

I willed myself through a junior college to a university and, ultimately, a Ph.D.

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.

Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another.

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

Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.

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.

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.

It's quite comforting to me as an individualist that we're not very close to being clones of one other.

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.

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.

The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome.

Accuracy in the genetic field will be essential. Errors in testing could be disastrous.

Life was so cheap in Vietnam. That is where my sense of urgency comes from.

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.

Fred Sanger was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.

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.

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.

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.

I hope I'll be remembered for my scientific contribution to understanding life and human life.

I see, in the future, bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use.

Traditional ways of distinguishing populations are irrelevant in terms of genetic code.

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.

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.

My genetic autobiography can be found throughout my body.

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.

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

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

You can imagine: 99 percent of your experiments fail for one reason or another.

You can't have life without the genetic code.

Is my science of a level consistent with other people who have gotten the Nobel? Yes.

We all evolved out of the same three or four groups in Africa, as black Africans.

I don't see any absolute biological limit on human age.

There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA.

A lot of people spend their last decade of their lives in pain and misery combating disease.

Ethanol's not an ideal fuel.

The gene 'klotho' was named after the Greek Fate purported to spin the thread of life, because it contributes to longevity.

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.

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.

Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.

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.

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.

We can create new food substances.

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.

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

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.

The photosynthesis we see with plants is not very efficient. Algaes are more efficient.

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.

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.