I turned 65 last year, and each year I get more and more interested in human health. For most people it happens around age 50, but I've always been a slow learner. It's critical in terms of the cost of health care.

We have 200 trillion cells, and the outcome of each of them is almost 100 percent genetically determined. And that's what our experiment with the first synthetic genome proves, at least in the case of really simple bacteria. It's the interactions of all those separate genetic units that give us the physiology that we see.

One of the things about genetics that has become clearer as we've done genomes - as we've worked our way through the evolutionary tree, including humans - is that we're probably much more genetic animals than we want to confess we are.

Craig Venter Quotes