Quotes from Sharon Moalem

Why would you take a drug that is guaranteed to kill you in forty years? One reason, right? It's the only thing that will stop you dying tomorrow.

By the way, the next time you get your cholesterol checked, make a note of the season. Because sunlight converts cholesterol to vitamin D, cholesterol levels can be higher in winter months, when we continue to make and eat cholesterol but there's less sunlight available to convert it.

As we're about to see, by striving for even greater genetic perfection we might be eliminating a lot more than just millions of people who don't fit the societal norms we've created. We might actually be eradicating the very solutions to the medical problems we're working so hard to solve.

far as to say that white-skinned people are actually black-skinned mutants who lost the ability to produce significant amounts of eumelanin. Redheads, with their characteristic milky white skin and freckles, may be a further mutation along the same lines. In order to survive in places with infrequent and weak sunlight, such as in parts of the U.K., they may have evolved in a way that almost completely knocked out their body's ability to produce eumelanin, the brown or black pigment.

In evolutionary terms, that means we asked for it.

The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote that once in a lifetime hope and history can rhyme. Evolution is what happens when history and change are in rhyme.

if there's fire on the mountain or lightning and storm and a god speaks from the sky. That means someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term.

For years now we've begun to notice detrimental changes in the curvatures of the spines of elementary-age schoolkids, who have been paying the price for overloaded backpacks.

In most circumstances when we spend a lengthy amount of time at higher elevations our genes begin to subtly adjust their expression, which prompts cells in our kidneys to make and secrete more erythropoietin, or EPO for short. This hormone stimulates cells in our bone marrow to increase the production of red blood cells, as well as keep the ones already in circulation around past their typical expiration date.

You may be surprised to learn that it's been estimated to cost up to $635 billion a year in the United States alone,8 a figure greater than the costs associated with conditions like heart disease and cancer.

One species of lizard is born with a long tail and large body or a small tail and small body depending on one thing only—whether their mother smelled a lizard-eating snake while pregnant. When her babies are entering a snake-filled world, they are born with a long tail and big body, making them less likely to be snake food.

From aardvarks to zebras, most of our mammalian cousins have working copies of the genes that can manufacture vitamin C naturally within their bodies. But humans (along with guinea pigs, of all things) have a genetic inborn error in metabolism, a mutation that renders us incapable of doing the same thing. This makes us completely dependent upon our diets to get our daily supply of vitamin C.

If a newly pregnant mother spends the first weeks of her pregnancy eating a typical junk-food-laden diet, the embryo may receive signals that it's going to be born into a harsh environment where critical types of food are scarce. Through a combination of epigenetic effects, various genes are turned on and off and the baby is born small, so it needs less food to survive.

Methylation works by the use of a chemical compound, in the shape of three-leaf clovers made up of hydrogen and carbon

French researchers led by Ivan Matic, of the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, studied hundreds of bacteria from all over the world and found that they also went into hyperdrive, mutationally speaking, when put under stress. Although the evidence is mounting, the case of hypermutation is definitely still pending.

Dense hair on the forearms and legs—the parts of the body usually exposed even with moderate dress—may have been a defense against malaria carried by mosquitoes. With the exception of Africa, where the heat was an evolutionary counterweight to thick body hair, the densest hair is generally found in the same places where malaria is most common—the eastern Mediterranean basin, southern Italy, Greece, and Turkey.

the notion that T. gondii may trigger schizophrenia is supported by recent studies demonstrating that mice that have toxoplasmosis modify their behavior when given antipsychotic medication. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University are now testing whether schizophrenics might be helped with antibiotics that fight toxoplasmosis.