Craig Venter Quotes

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

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.

We have learned nothing from the genome.

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

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

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

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.

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

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.

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

Life is a DNA software system.

The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people's lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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