Quotes from Craig Venter

Mitochondrial DNA is in higher concentration, lasts longer, and can be extracted from bones.

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.

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.

I think I'm a survivor. I could have suffered at least 100 professional deaths. I could come up with a list of the 100 times I've come closest to death, from having pneumonia as a child to car crashes.

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

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.

In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.

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.

I'm hoping that these next 20 years will show what we did 20 years ago in sequencing the first human genome, was the beginning of the health revolution that will have more positive impact in people's lives than any other health event in history.

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

We need 10,000 genomes, not 100, to start to understand the link between genetics, disease and wellness.

Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our planet.

The future of society is 100% dependent on scientific advances.

Moving forward in science is as much unwinding the distorted thinking of the past as it is putting a clearer idea on the table.

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

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.

Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply.

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.

Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective.

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

Nobel prizes are very special prizes, and it would be great to get one.

The chemistry from compounds in the environment is orders of magnitude more complex than our best chemists can produce.

If there is a race, it is one to bring the benefits of genomes to human therapeutics. We all want to get there. We all want people to have much more meaningful and productive lives as they age.

There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA.