Quotes About Genes

W]hen trying to understand the character of the modern mind, it is impossible to separate the effects of genes and the developmental environment.

Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.

trawl through the history of cancer research draws one up sharp: almost everything we know today about cancer – as a disease of the cells and of the genes – was suggested by someone way back before scientists had any way of testing their ideas, and who is often forgotten by those who later reveal them as facts when the world is more ready to listen.

The research community became fixated on an 'accelerator' model of cancer – one in which the normal mechanism of cell division is being actively reprogrammed by these 'rogue' genes, the oncogenes, to go into overdrive, thus causing the cells to proliferate wildly. This was the mindset at the time p53 was discovered in 1979.

Just like genes, the memes have no foresight. They cannot be expected to foresee that almost anything might happen. They might even, in the process of diverting our energies from the genes, just wipe us out.

Biologists would argue that at root the quest for beauty is driven by the genes pressing to be passed on and making their current habitat as inviting for visitors as possible.

A virus does not reproduce by copying its own genes and dividing in two. Instead, it invades a host cell.

single base may change from A to C. A stretch of a hundred bases may be accidentally copied out twice. A thousand bases may be cut out altogether. These are the mutations that scientists like Hugo de Vries and Thomas Hunt Morgan spent years trying to figure out. Mutations can produce new versions of genes—alleles, as they came to be known.

influenza viruses manage to wreak their harm with very little genetic information—just thirteen genes.

Like cold-causing rhinoviruses, influenza viruses manage to wreak their harm with very little genetic information—just thirteen genes.

In a study of fifty patients with SARS, they discovered a virus growing in two of them. The virus belonged to a group called coronaviruses, which includes species that can cause colds and the stomach flu. Peiris and his colleagues sequenced the genetic material in the new virus and then searched for matching genes in the other patients. They found a match in forty-five of them.

The Danish plant physiologist Wilhelm Johannsen gave Mendel's factors a new name: genes. "As to the nature of the 'genes,'" Johannsen warned, "it is as yet of no value to propose any hypothesis.

The concept of genes driving people's appetite caused them to lose some control of their own.

Po naszej Å›mierci – pisaÅ' Dawkins – pozostajÄ… po nas dwie rzeczy: geny i memy

For some people, it's best for their mental health to know they have the gene for Huntington's and some time in the future they'll have a problem. But to other people, it would be a disaster.

People think if you have deciphered the genome of humans that you can change everything. But you cannot change everything, because you do not know what the genes mean, and you have no methods for changing them, and you can't do experiments with humans like you can with animals.

epigenetics is teaching us that you can change the ways that your genes work by making changes in your behavior and your environment.

ideas are exactly as interested in the brains they're in as genes are in the bodies they're in: just enough to get themselves copied...Like computer viruses.

Falling in love indicated that your genes were complementary to those of the loved one. It told you nothing about whether your personalities and sexualities were compatible.

You could be the fittest person imaginable in terms of strength, intelligence, disease resistance and vitality, but if you fail to reproduce your contribution to the future of the human gene pool is zero. For anything to evolve it has to affect the probability of passing on your genes.

Thus the name of the game when it comes to evolution is not obtaining food or other resources: it is reproduction. Which came first, the chick or the egg? From an evolutionary perspective the egg did. A chicken is merely an egg's way of producing another egg. The chicken is just a transient reproductive superstructure that provides for the perpetuation of genes.

Genetic engineering is not really something new. Human beings have been fiddling with genes for as long as ten thousand years. That's how long they have been growing plants and herding animals.

We knew that all the protein-coding bits of genes do is to produce protein - they have to have instructions to turn them on and off. Those sequences lie well outside the protein-coding sequences, sometimes thousands, tens of thousands of bases away.

We know specific genes are turned on in specific cells, but we don't know to what extent this happens.