Quotes by Craig Venter

“All these names are bigger-than-life names, ... When you see their actual letters and their notebooks, it puts a real stamp of humanity on these people.”

“If anything, weve learned that we dont think this datas going to be as deterministic as was previously thought, ... There is even more need for this legislation until science catches up with our collective ignorance.”

“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.”

“It is my belief that the basic knowledge that were 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,”

“[Thats what Rockville, Md.-based Celera, a company that sets ambitious goals often unlikely to yield big financial returns in the short run, has set out to do.] This has been in the works for a long time, ... This was something that was always obvious to do as a next step.”

“A good leader takes advantage of that.”

“the most important scientific effort that humankind has ever mounted.”

“This has been in the works for a long time. This was something that was always obvious to do as a next step.”

The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some peoples lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.

I was a surf bum wannabe. I left home at age 17 and moved to Southern California to try to take up surfing as a vocation, but this was in 1964, and there was this nasty little thing called the Vietnam War. As a result, I got drafted.

I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.

The day is not far off when we will be able to send a robotically controlled genome-sequencing unit in a probe to other planets to read the DNA sequence of any alien microbe life that may be there.

Bloombergs, you know, for people who dont use the service, provides through the Internet - through specialized computers - information about the financial world. Its a very large data base. I think they have on the order of a billion dollars or more a year in revenue.

Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. Thats why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.

Most people dont realize it, because theyre invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earths biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass.

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 dont get breast cancer.

Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyones information is out there, its part of the collective.

Even though people pretend that medical records are privileged information, anyone can already get their hands on them.

Im hoping that these next 20 years will show what we did 20 years ago in sequencing the first human genome, was the beginning of the health revolution that will have more positive impact in peoples lives than any other health event in history.

Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earths environment.