Craig Venter

“It's quite comforting to me as an individualist that we're not very close to being clones of one other.”

“Creating life at the speed of light is part of a new industrial revolution. Manufacturing will shift from centralised factories to a distributed, domestic manufacturing future, thanks to the...”

“There's a constant debate over nature or nurture - they're inseparable.”

“I willed myself through a junior college to a university and, ultimately, a Ph.D.”

“A lot of people spend their last decade of their lives in pain and misery combating disease.”

“There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people's lives.”

“If you have lung cancer, the most important thing you can know is your genetic code.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Sailing is a big outlet for me. It's one of the key things I've been able to do by commingling science with sailing and my love of the sea. Also, I have several motorcycles, and I like to go...”

“I wrote an editorial piece in 'Science' about the nightly data release and how I thought it was bad for science as a field, I think a few years before Celera was formed.”

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

“Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.”

“I've made money by just trying to do world-class science. That's the goal that we're setting at Celera. If we do world-class science and create new medicine paradigms, the money will more th...”

“I'm 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...”

“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...”

“Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.”

“Companies, cities, and potentially even individuals could have a small refinery to make their own fuel.”

“There's not going to be any one replacement for oil: we need to have hundreds of solutions to this global issue.”