Craig Venter Quotes

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Craig Venter

Profession : Scientist

Birth : October 14, 1946

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.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

We can create new ways to create clean water.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter