Genomics are about individuals. It's about what's specific to you, not your siblings, not your parents - each of us is totally unique. We will only see that uniqueness by drilling down to the genetic code.
— Craig Venter
Our genomes are evolving and changing every single day.
If I had a weak ego, and doubts about this, the first genome would not yet have been completed with US and UK government funding.
That's the nice thing about the field of science - the test of time sorts out the truth.
Cells will die in minutes to days if they lack their genetic information system. They will not evolve, they will not replicate, and they will not live.
I've had a very unusual background in science - not the usual route of planning on being a scientist from age 3. I think my story shows that success is more about personal motivation and determination than it is about where you were born or what your economic status was.
San Francisco is one of my favorite cities on the planet.
We're a country of laws and rules, and the Supreme Court has ruled that life forms are patentable entities.
When most people talk about biofuels, they talk about using oils or grease from plants.
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.
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.
It's very expensive to treat chronic diseases.
Once we all have our genomes, some of these extremely rare diseases are going to be totally predictable.
I am confident that life once thrived on Mars and may well still exist there today.
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.
If you have lung cancer, the most important thing you can know is your genetic code.
We have 100 genes or so, which we know we can't knock out without killing the cell, that are of unknown structure.
The interpretation of medicine today is 'do your clinical values fall within a normal range?' Everything in the globe right now is in the law of averages, which mean absolutely nothing to individuals.
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 people's lives than any other health event in history.
Show me a highly successful person in any field that has gotten there having a weak ego. You have to believe in yourself, and you have to believe in what you're doing.
One of the challenges with a government health system, like in the UK, with all of this data, is that you have a government making decisions on which treatments they'll pay for and which ones they won't. That's a dangerous, dangerous, place to get into society.
As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.
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.
Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.
There's not going to be any one replacement for oil: we need to have hundreds of solutions to this global issue.
Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our planet.
The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time.
People think they're making individual decisions for themselves and their family not to get vaccinated. It's not just an individual choice - you're a hazard to society.
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.
My greatest fear is not the abuse of technology but that we will not use it at all.
Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it's not a disease itself.
Perfect pitch is genetic. It's 100% genetic.
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.
We need 10,000 genomes, not 100, to start to understand the link between genetics, disease and wellness.
I thought we'd just sequence the genome once and that would be sufficient for most things in people's lifetimes. Now we're seeing how changeable and adaptable it is, which is why we're surviving and evolving as a species.
I think I've achieved some good things; doing the first genome in history - my team on that was phenomenal and all the things they pulled together; writing the first genome with a synthetic cell; my teams at the Venter Institute, Human Longevity, and before that Celera.
The leading edge of the best science in the world is being driven by private money, and investment money because of the scarcity of government money to do this. It's not only by far the best and most advanced science, we're driving the equation at Human Longevity that everyone else is beginning to follow as well.
Every single cancer is a genetic disease. Not necessarily inherited from your parents, but it's genetic changes which cause cancer. So as we sequence the genomes of tumours and compare those to the sequence of patients, we're getting down to the fundamental basis of each individual person's cancer.
One important part of scientific training is that scientists learn the boundaries, the safety issues, how to properly deal with and dispose of chemicals and reagents.
Sailing is a big outlet for me.
Intellectual property is a key aspect for economic development.
The rich agricultural nations are the ones that can adapt to the new biotechnologies.
There's a lot of what I call 'bio-babble' and hype out there from a lot of bioenergy companies.
It takes 10 kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef, 15 liters of water to get one kilogram of beef, and those cows produce a lot of methane. Why not get rid of the cows?
Preventative medicine has to be the direction we go in. For example, if colon cancer is detected early - because a person knew he had a genetic risk and was having frequent exams - the surgery is relatively inexpensive and average survival is far greater than 10 years.
People are comprised of sets of DNA from each parent. If you looked at just the DNA from your father, it wouldn't tell you who you really are.
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 there.
Human lifespan used to be 30 years, 25 years. But there's no basic, fundamental reason why it has to be short.
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.
I spent 10 years trying to find one gene.
