Craig Venter Gen Quotations

People think genes are an absolute cause of traits. But the notion that the genome is the blueprint for humanity is a very bad metaphor. If you think we're hard-wired and deterministic, there should indeed be a lot more genes.

In the past, geneticists have looked at so-called disease genes, but a lot of people have changes in their genes and don't get these diseases. There have to be other parts of physiology and genetics that compensate.

Each part of our genome is unique. We would not be alive if there was not a single mathematical solution for our chromosomes. We would just be scrambled goo.

Since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast into space in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth. Whether there is any creature out there capable of making sense of the instructions in my genome, well, that's another question.

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.

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.

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.

The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time.

You cannot look at a person's genes and say with any accuracy whether they are from one racial group or another.

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.

Traditional autobiography has generally had a poor press. The novelist Daphne du Maurier condemned all examples of this literary form as self-indulgent. Others have quipped that autobiography reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome.

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

I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet.

I have a blend of klotho gene variants that have been linked with a lower risk for coronary artery disease and stroke and an advantage in longevity.

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.

We said that once we had finished sequencing the genome we would make it available to the scientific community for free, ... And we will be doing that on Monday morning at 10am.

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.

The gene 'klotho' was named after the Greek Fate purported to spin the thread of life, because it contributes to longevity.

Transposons are just small pieces of DNA that randomly insert in the genetic code. And if they insert in the middle of the gene, they disrupt its function.

People think that Celera's trying to patent the whole human genome because it's been used as - I guess people in Washington learn how to do political attacks, and so it gets used as a political weapon, not as a factual one.

We have learned nothing from the genome.

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.

Life was so cheap in Vietnam. That is where my sense of urgency comes from.

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.

Now that we can read and write the genetic code, put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life, it will be possible to speed up biological evolution to the pace of social evolution.

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.

Organisms in the ocean provide over 40 percent of the oxygen we breathe, and they're the major sink for capturing all the carbon dioxide we constantly release into the atmosphere.

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.

I naively thought that we could have a molecular definition for life, come up with a set of genes that would minimally define life. Nature just refuses to be so easily quantified.

Mathematicians have been hiding and writing messages in the genetic code for a long time, but it's clear they were mathematicians and not biologists because, if you write long messages with the code that the mathematicians developed, it would more than likely lead to new proteins being synthesized with unknown functions.

Knowing what your parents have gives you hints of things, but your genome is a totally unique combination of and interchange of DNA from your parents. There is no one else like you genetically.