Quotes from Craig Venter

It's very expensive to treat chronic diseases.

Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it's not a disease itself.

I think I've achieved some good things; doing the first genome in history - my team on that was phenomenal and all the things they pulled together; writing the first genome with a synthetic cell; my teams at the Venter Institute, Human Longevity, and before that Celera.

If I could change the science system, my prescription for changing the whole thing would be organising it around big goals and building teams to do it.

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.

You can't just live in a comfortable little suburban neighborhood and get your education from movies and television and have any perspective on life.

One important part of scientific training is that scientists learn the boundaries, the safety issues, how to properly deal with and dispose of chemicals and reagents.

Intellectual property is a key aspect for economic development.

That's the nice thing about the field of science - the test of time sorts out the truth.

Accuracy in the genetic field will be essential. Errors in testing could be disastrous.

One of the fundamental discoveries I made about myself - early enough to make use of it - was that I am driven to seize life and to understand it. The motor that pushes me is propelled by more than scientific curiosity.

San Francisco is one of my favorite cities on the planet.

Human lifespan used to be 30 years, 25 years. But there's no basic, fundamental reason why it has to be short.

Creating life at the speed of light is part of a new industrial revolution. Manufacturing will shift from centralised factories to a distributed, domestic manufacturing future, thanks to the rise of 3D printer technology.

Fred Sanger was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.

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

The interpretation of medicine today is 'do your clinical values fall within a normal range?' Everything in the globe right now is in the law of averages, which mean absolutely nothing to individuals.

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

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

Race has no genetic or scientific basis.

We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.

My genetic autobiography can be found throughout my body.

You can't have life without the genetic code.

The fact that I have a risk genetically for Alzheimer's and blindness is not great news. But the reality is that any one of us will have dozens of these risks, and what we have to learn is how to deal with them.