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
My greatest fear is not the abuse of technology but that we will not use it at all.
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.
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.
We can now diagnose diseases that haven't even manifested in the patient, and may not until the fifth decade of life - if at all.
You can imagine: 99 percent of your experiments fail for one reason or another.
The photosynthesis we see with plants is not very efficient. Algaes are more efficient.
When you do cross-breeding of plants, you're doing this blind experiment where you're just mixing DNA of different types of cells and just seeing what comes out of it.
We all evolved out of the same three or four groups in Africa, as black Africans.
We said that once we had finished sequencing the genome we would make it available to the scientific community for free, ... And we will be doing that on Monday morning at 10am.
You cannot look at a person's genes and say with any accuracy whether they are from one racial group or another.
When most people talk about biofuels, they talk about using oils or grease from plants.
For each gene in your genome, you quite often get a different version of that gene from your father and a different version from your mother. We need to study these relationships across a very large number of people.
It's quite comforting to me as an individualist that we're not very close to being clones of one other.
Darwin didn't walk around the Galapagos and come up with the theory of evolution. He was exploring, collecting, making observations. It wasn't until he got back and went through the samples that he noticed the differences among them and put them in context.