Craig Venter Quotes

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Craig Venter

Profession : Scientist

Birth : October 14, 1946

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

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

It's very expensive to treat chronic diseases.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

I spent 10 years trying to find one gene.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

Nobel prizes are very special prizes, and it would be great to get one.

Craig Venter

Race has no genetic or scientific basis.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter

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.

Craig Venter

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

Craig Venter