Quotes from Craig Venter

Darwin didn't walk around the Galapagos and come up with the theory of evolution. He was exploring, collecting, making observations. It wasn't until he got back and went through the samples that he noticed the differences among them and put them in context.

Once we all have our genomes, some of these extremely rare diseases are going to be totally predictable.

I've gotten some pretty nice awards. I'm having trouble finding places to put them all.

We all evolved out of the same three or four groups in Africa, as black Africans.

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

People want to protect the territory that they have, and they're very threatened by change. That's not true for all of scientists, but you know, fortunately, the scientific community moves forward in a conservative fashion.

I am confident that life once thrived on Mars and may well still exist there today.

Life is a DNA software system.

As a scientist, I clearly see the potential for harnessing the power of nature.

Science should be the most fun job on the planet. You get to ask questions about the world around you and go out and seek the answers. Not to have fun doing that is crazy.

People think they're making individual decisions for themselves and their family not to get vaccinated. It's not just an individual choice - you're a hazard to society.

Companies, cities, and potentially even individuals could have a small refinery to make their own fuel.

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.

It appears that the human genome does indeed contain deserts, or large, gene-poor regions.

I wrote an editorial piece in 'Science' about the nightly data release and how I thought it was bad for science as a field, I think a few years before Celera was formed.

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.

I've always been fascinated with adrenaline; it's saved my life more than once, and it's caused me to need it to save my life more than once. One of the most fascinating responses in human evolution, adrenaline sharpens your brain; it sharpens your responses.

I've made money by just trying to do world-class science. That's the goal that we're setting at Celera. If we do world-class science and create new medicine paradigms, the money will more than follow at a corporate level and at a personal level.

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

I hope I'll be remembered for my scientific contribution to understanding life and human life.

When you think of all the things that are made from oil or in the chemical industry, if in the future we could find cells to replace most of those processes, the ideal way would be to do it by direct design.

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.

There have been lots of stories written about all the hype over getting the genome done and the letdown of not discovering lots of cures right after.

There's a lot of what I call 'bio-babble' and hype out there from a lot of bioenergy companies.