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
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.
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.
Right now, oil is being isolated around the globe, and there is a major effort in shipping, trucking and otherwise transporting that oil around to a very finite number of refineries. Biology allows us to make these same fuels in a much more distributed fashion.
Mathematicians have been hiding and writing messages in the genetic code for a long time, but it's clear they were mathematicians and not biologists because, if you write long messages with the code that the mathematicians developed, it would more than likely lead to new proteins being synthesized with unknown functions.
My genetic autobiography can be found throughout my body.
Accuracy in the genetic field will be essential. Errors in testing could be disastrous.
San Francisco is one of my favorite cities on the planet.
Knowing what your parents have gives you hints of things, but your genome is a totally unique combination of and interchange of DNA from your parents. There is no one else like you genetically.
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.
Life was so cheap in Vietnam. That is where my sense of urgency comes from.
The future of society is 100% dependent on scientific advances.
We know virtually all of the genes known to mammals. We do not know all of the combinations.
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.