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
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.
You can't just live in a comfortable little suburban neighborhood and get your education from movies and television and have any perspective on life.
I have the modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry.
I don't know if the optimists or the pessimists are right. But, the optimists are going to get something done.
Life was so cheap in Vietnam. That is where my sense of urgency comes from.
I willed myself through a junior college to a university and, ultimately, a Ph.D.
If you have lung cancer, the most important thing you can know is your genetic code.
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.
Everybody is looking for a naturally occurring algae that is going to be a miracle cell to save the world, and after a century of looking, people still haven't found it.
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.
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.