Craig Venter Quotes

Genomic science, as the newest frontier in scholarly research, is throwing open the door to a revolutionary way of approaching our health, the health and welfare of animals, and the sustainability of our environment.

I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt.

I think I've achieved some good things; doing the first genome in history - my team on that was phenomenal and all the things they pulled together; writing the first genome with a synthetic cell; my teams at the Venter Institute, Human Longevity, and before that Celera.

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

If you get very fine, accurate, and inexpensive control over your genome, you can fundamentally change the kind of organism you are. You are extending human capacity.

I am now obsessed with the technology of the body. I think it's the most technologically literate thing that we have.

You can now modify the genes of large animals, and the largest animal we are concerned with is the human.

We have created life.

… biologists are now going to be directing evolution.

As the scientific community has started debating “human-directed evolution” the biosecurity establishment remains behind the curve.

Dual use research of concern (DURC) is research that, based on current understanding, can be reasonably anticipated to provide knowledge, products, or technologies that could be directly misapplied by others to pose a threat to public health and safety, agricultural crops and other plants, animals, the environment, or materiel

In chemicals, Synthetic Genomics is one of my real loves.

Biology is now accelerating at a pace faster than Moore's Law.

I think we're just scratching the surface. One of the most exciting aspects of 23andMe is that we're enabling you to watch a revolution unfold live during your lifetime, and I think that the decoding of the genome, in my opinion, is the most fascinating discovery of our lifetime, and you get to be part of it.

We live in a science fictional world with things like cloning and face transplants, and things seem to be getting stranger and stranger.

Writing genetic code like we do software will usher in a completely new way of living for all of us. When this happens, our society will be as fundamentally changed as we have seen from the invention of computers.

Biology is the most powerful technology ever created. DNA is software, protein are hardware, cells are factories.

Printing novel DNA might open the way to achievements once only conceivable in science fiction: designer bacteria that can produce new chemicals, such as more efficient fuels, or synthetic versions of our cells that make us resistant to the effects of radiation.

When something like personal genomics or synthetic biology suddenly appears - it seems to suddenly appear - we might have been working on it for 30 years, but it seems to come out of nowhere. Then you need strategies for engaging a lot of people and thinking about where it will be going in the next few months or few years.

The potential for synthetic biology and biotechnology is vast; we all have an opportunity to create the future together.

If you get a personal genome, you should be able to get personal cell lines, stem cell derived from your adult tissues, that allow you to bring together synthetic biology and the sequencing so that you can repair parts of your body as you age or repair things that were inherited disorders.

I'm interested in using evolution to move forward into the future, to get biology to do a lot of new chemistry for us.

Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?

It once seemed that the most profound feats stemming from DNA-based science would spring from our ability to read and detect genes, which we call the science of genomics. But the real opportunities lie in our ability to write DNA, to synthesize new gene sequences and insert them into organisms, resulting in brand-new biological functions.

Simple genome engineering of bacteria and yeast is just the beginning of the rise of the true biohackers. This is a community of several thousand people, with skill sets ranging from self-taught software hackers to biology postdocs who are impatient with the structure of traditional institutional lab work.