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
Craig Venter quotes about
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.
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.
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.
When most people talk about biofuels, they talk about using oils or grease from plants.
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.
The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.
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.
Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective.
Any virus that's been sequenced today - that genome can be made.
It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum.
We have learned nothing from the genome.
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 think from my experience in war and life and science, it all has made me believe that we have one life on this planet. We have one chance to live it and to contribute to the future of society and the future of life. The only "afterlife" is what other people remember of you.