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
As a scientist, I clearly see the potential for harnessing the power of nature.
There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA.
There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people's lives.
We're a country of laws and rules, and the Supreme Court has ruled that life forms are patentable entities.
The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time.
Organisms in the ocean provide over 40 percent of the oxygen we breathe, and they're the major sink for capturing all the carbon dioxide we constantly release into the atmosphere.
Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.
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.
I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet.
In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.
If there is a race, it is one to bring the benefits of genomes to human therapeutics. We all want to get there. We all want people to have much more meaningful and productive lives as they age.
I hope I'll be remembered for my scientific contribution to understanding life and human life.
I naively thought that we could have a molecular definition for life, come up with a set of genes that would minimally define life. Nature just refuses to be so easily quantified.
Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.