Craig Venter

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

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.

Traditional ways of distinguishing populations are irrelevant in terms of genetic code.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

There's not going to be any one replacement for oil: we need to have hundreds of solutions to this global issue.

The trouble is the field of science, medicine, universities, biotech companies - you name it - have been so splintered, layers, sub-divided, hacked that people can spend their entire career studying one tiny little cog of life.

A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.