Craig Venter

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.

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.

When I started my Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, I was told that it would be difficult to make a new discovery in biology because it was all known. It all seems so absurd now.

Race has no genetic or scientific basis.

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.

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.

We have trouble feeding, providing fresh, clean water, medicines, fuel for the six and a half billion. It's going to be a stretch to do it for nine.

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.

When you do cross-breeding of plants, you're doing this blind experiment where you're just mixing DNA of different types of cells and just seeing what comes out of it.

Right now, oil is being isolated around the globe, and there is a major effort in shipping, trucking and otherwise transporting that oil around to a very finite number of refineries. Biology allows us to make these same fuels in a much more distributed fashion.

It's quite comforting to me as an individualist that we're not very close to being clones of one other.

I was a horrible student. I really hated school.