Knowing what your parents have gives you hints of things, but your genome is a totally unique combination of and interchange of DNA from your parents. There is no one else like you genetically.
Craig VenterRead
Genomics are about individuals. It's about what's specific to you, not your siblings, not your parents - each of us is totally unique. We will only see that uniqueness by drilling down to the genetic code.
Interpretation
Genomics focuses on the individual genetic makeup that makes each person unique.
The quote emphasizes the importance of genomics in understanding what makes each individual distinct at a genetic level. While we share genetic similarities with our family members, it is the unique combinations found in our individual genetic codes that define who we are, highlighting the significance of personalized medicine and tailored healthcare based on our individual genomes.
In practice
In a speech about the future of healthcare, the speaker referenced Venter's quote to illustrate the need for personalized medicine.
Knowing what your parents have gives you hints of things, but your genome is a totally unique combination of and interchange of DNA from your parents. There is no one else like you genetically.
We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.
A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.
The Anthropocentic Age - the first age in which humankind is the dominant species on the planet - cuts both ways: it is up to us to destroy or save the planet. We certainly have the ability.
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.
Now that we can read and write the genetic code, put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life, it will be possible to speed up biological evolution to the pace of social evolution.
We have at most ten years - not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions... We are near a tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built in momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this planet.
What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform... But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself.
We have never observed infinity in nature. Whenever you have infinities in a theory, that's where the theory fails as a description of nature. And if space was born in the Big Bang, yet is infinite now, we are forced to believe that it's instantaneously, infinitely big. It seems absurd.
No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.
Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.
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