Craig Venter

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

“People equate patents with secrecy, that secrecy is what patents were designed to overcome. That's why the formula for Coca-Cola was never patented. They kept it as a trade secret, and they've outlasted patent laws by 80 years or more.”

“A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.”

“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.”

“We can create new food substances.”

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

“There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA.”

“Synthetic biology can help address key challenges facing the planet and its population. Research in synthetic biology may lead to new things such as programmed cells that self-assemble at the sites of disease to repair damage.”

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

“My early years were hardly a model of focus, discipline, and direction. No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries. No one could have predicted the arc of my career.”

“We're a country of laws and rules, and the Supreme Court has ruled that life forms are patentable entities.”

“Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.”

“Is my science of a level consistent with other people who have gotten the Nobel? Yes.”

“We have 100 genes or so, which we know we can't knock out without killing the cell, that are of unknown structure.”

“The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.”

“We can do genetics. We can do experiments on fruit flies. We can do experiments on yeast. It's not so easy to do experiments on humans. So, in fact, it helps us, to interpret our own genetic code, to have the genetic code of the other species.”

“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.”

“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 on motorcycle trips.”

“Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.”

“I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me.”