“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.”

American biotechnologist and entrepreneur, Venter co-founded Celera Genomics and led the private Human Genome Project. His work revolutionized genomics with the first commercially assembled human genome and pioneering synthetic biology research.