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
'Bloomberg's, you know, for people who don't use the service, provides through the Internet - through specialized computers - information about the financial world. It's a very large data base. I think they have on the order of a billion dollars or more a year in revenue.
I've made money by just trying to do world-class science. That's the goal that we're setting at Celera. If we do world-class science and create new medicine paradigms, the money will more than follow at a corporate level and at a personal level.
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.
Science should be the most fun job on the planet. You get to ask questions about the world around you and go out and seek the answers. Not to have fun doing that is crazy.
As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.
There have been lots of stories written about all the hype over getting the genome done and the letdown of not discovering lots of cures right after.
There's not going to be any one replacement for oil: we need to have hundreds of solutions to this global issue.
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.
We need 10,000 genomes, not 100, to start to understand the link between genetics, disease and wellness.
We have 100 genes or so, which we know we can't knock out without killing the cell, that are of unknown structure.
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.
Mathematicians have been hiding and writing messages in the genetic code for a long time, but it's clear they were mathematicians and not biologists because, if you write long messages with the code that the mathematicians developed, it would more than likely lead to new proteins being synthesized with unknown functions.
I think I'm a survivor. I could have suffered at least 100 professional deaths. I could come up with a list of the 100 times I've come closest to death, from having pneumonia as a child to car crashes.
I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry.