I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry.

— Craig Venter

I think I'm a survivor. I could have suffered at least 100 professional deaths. Furthermore, 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.

— Craig Venter

I was a surf bum wannabe. I left home at age 17 and moved to Southern California to try to take up surfing as a vocation, but this was in 1964, and there was this nasty little thing called the Vietnam War. As a result, I got drafted.

— Craig Venter

Life is a DNA software system.

— Craig Venter

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.

— Craig Venter

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.

— Craig Venter

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

— Craig Venter

Sometime in the future, I am a hundred percent certain scientists will sit down at a computer terminal, design what they want the organism to do, and build it.

— Craig Venter

The day is not far off when we will be able to send a robotically controlled genome-sequencing unit in a probe to other planets to read the DNA sequence of any alien microbe life that may be there.

— Craig Venter

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

— Craig Venter