Craig Venter

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

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

Life is a DNA software system.

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.

Creating life at the speed of light is part of a new industrial revolution. Manufacturing will shift from centralised factories to a distributed, domestic manufacturing future, thanks to the rise of 3D printer technology.

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.

Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.

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.

As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.

In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.

Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.

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.

Even though people pretend that medical records are privileged information, anyone can already get their hands on them.

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

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.

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.

Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.

'Bloomberg's, you know, for people who don't use the service, provides through the Internet - through specialized computers - information about the financial world. It's a very large data base. I think they have on the order of a billion dollars or more a year in revenue.