A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.
— Craig Venter
Life is a DNA software system.
I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment.
Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective.
Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.
If I could change the science system, my prescription for changing the whole thing would be organising it around big goals and building teams to do it.
Nobel prizes are very special prizes, and it would be great to get one.
It turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA - 30 to 50 letters in length - and it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are.
I've gotten some pretty nice awards. I'm having trouble finding places to put them all.
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.
The trouble is the field of science, medicine, universities, biotech companies - you name it - have been so splintered, layers, sub-divided, hacked that people can spend their entire career studying one tiny little cog of life.
We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology.
Most people don't realize it, because they're invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earth's biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass.
The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.
