Top 173 Quotes & Sayings by Craig Venter - Page 3

We need 10,000 genomes, not 100, to start to understand the link between genetics, disease and wellness.

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?

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.

Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it's not a disease itself.

Human lifespan used to be 30 years, 25 years. But there's no basic, fundamental reason why it has to be short.

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.

Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply.

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.

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.

The rich agricultural nations are the ones that can adapt to the new biotechnologies.

San Francisco is one of my favorite cities on the planet.

My greatest fear is not the abuse of technology but that we will not use it at all.

Perfect pitch is genetic. It's 100% genetic.

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.

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.

We're a country of laws and rules, and the Supreme Court has ruled that life forms are patentable entities.

It's very expensive to treat chronic diseases.

Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our planet.

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.

When most people talk about biofuels, they talk about using oils or grease from plants.

If you have lung cancer, the most important thing you can know is your genetic code.

We know virtually all of the genes known to mammals. We do not know all of the combinations.

I spent 10 years trying to find one gene.

As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.

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.

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.

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.

Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.

There's a lot of what I call 'bio-babble' and hype out there from a lot of bioenergy companies.

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.

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.

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.

I am confident that life once thrived on Mars and may well still exist there today.

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.

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.

There's not going to be any one replacement for oil: we need to have hundreds of solutions to this global issue.

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.

We have 100 genes or so, which we know we can't knock out without killing the cell, that are of unknown structure.

That's the nice thing about the field of science - the test of time sorts out the truth.

It appears that the human genome does indeed contain deserts, or large, gene-poor regions.

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.

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.

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.

Our genomes are evolving and changing every single day.

We have learned nothing from the genome.

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. We have one chance to live it and to contribute to the future of society and the future of life. The only "afterlife" is what other people remember of you.

I have the modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry.

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.

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.

Moving forward in science is as much unwinding the distorted thinking of the past as it is putting a clearer idea on the table.

Any virus that's been sequenced today - that genome can be made.

I don't know if the optimists or the pessimists are right. But, the optimists are going to get something done.

It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum.