Craig Venter quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There's a constant debate over nature or nurture - they're inseparable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Intellectual property is a key aspect for economic development.

Once we all have our genomes, some of these extremely rare diseases are going to be totally predictable.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry.

The future of society is 100% dependent on scientific advances.

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

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.

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.

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

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

It's very expensive to treat chronic diseases.

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

There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people's lives.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.

I was a horrible student. I really hated school.

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

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

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.

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.

A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The chemistry from compounds in the environment is orders of magnitude more complex than our best chemists can produce.

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.

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

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

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

Even though people pretend that medical records are privileged information, anyone can already get their hands on them.

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.

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.

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

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

You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.

Ethanol's not an ideal fuel.

Mitochondrial DNA is in higher concentration, lasts longer, and can be extracted from bones.

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.

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

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.

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.

The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time.

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.

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.

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

I've gotten some pretty nice awards. I'm having trouble finding places to put them all.

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

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

Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective.

We have learned nothing from the genome.

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.

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.

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

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.