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 complaint is that there are more books and news articles than there are primary scientific papers. I am probably the biggest critic of the hypesters, because it's dangerous when fields get overhyped.
When I started my Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, I was told that it would be difficult to make a new discovery in biology because it was all known. It all seems so absurd now.
We know virtually all of the genes known to mammals. We do not know all of the combinations.
We all evolved out of the same three or four groups in Africa, as black Africans.
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.
We're a country of laws and rules, and the Supreme Court has ruled that life forms are patentable entities.
There have been lots of stories written about all the hype over getting the genome done and the letdown of not discovering lots of cures right after.
You cannot look at a person's genes and say with any accuracy whether they are from one racial group or another.
You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.
When you think of all the things that are made from oil or in the chemical industry, if in the future we could find cells to replace most of those processes, the ideal way would be to do it by direct design.
We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before.
We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.
There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people's lives.
There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA.