Craig Venter

Mathematicians have been hiding and writing messages in the genetic code for a long time, but it's clear they were mathematicians and not biologists because, if you write long messages with the code that the mathematicians developed, it would more than likely lead to new proteins being synthesized with unknown functions. ”

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

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

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you. ”

Synthetic biology can help address key challenges facing the planet and its population. Research in synthetic biology may lead to new things such as programmed cells that self-assemble at the sites of disease to repair damage. ”

It turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA - 30 to 50 letters in length - and it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are. ”

How we understand our own selves and how we work with our DNA software has implications that will affect everything from vaccine development to new approaches to antibiotics, new sources of food, new sources of chemicals, even potentially new sources of energy. ”

The future of society is 100% dependent on scientific advances. ”

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. ”

I see, in the future, bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use. ”