Craig Venter
Craig Venter
John Craig Venteris an American biotechnologist, biochemist, geneticist, and entrepreneur. He is known for being one of the first to sequence the human genome and the first to transfect a cell with a synthetic genome. Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Researchand the J. Craig Venter Institute, and is now CEO of Human Longevity Inc. He was listed on Time magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth14 October 1946
CountryUnited States of America
I suppose if there's a set of genes I have, it's detesting authority.
People are comprised of sets of DNA from each parent. If you looked at just the DNA from your father, it wouldn't tell you who you really are.
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.
Life was so cheap in Vietnam. That is where my sense of urgency comes from.
I willed myself through a junior college to a university and, ultimately, a Ph.D.
The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.
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.
Organisms in the ocean provide over 40 percent of the oxygen we breathe, and they're the major sink for capturing all the carbon dioxide we constantly release into the atmosphere.
Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply.