Craig Venter Quotes

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Craig Venter

Profession : Scientist

Birth : October 14, 1946

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our planet.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter