Quotes About Mutations

Some critics believe the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it.

In order to be suitable material for the work of natural selection, mutations must be rare events, as they actually are. If they were so frequent that there was a considerable chance of, say, a dozen of different mutations occurring in the same individual, the injurious ones would, as a rule, predominate over the advantageous ones and the species, instead of being improved by selection, would remain unimproved, or would perish.

Our experience in fooling around with the genes of mice has taught us that many of the traits that interest us are not definite products of specific mutations but emergent phenomena arising from extremely complex interactions between genes, environment, and life experience.

DNA passes on information with extraordinary fidelity. It makes only about one error per every billion letters copied. Still, because your cells divide so much, that is about three errors, or mutations, per cell division. Most of those mutations the body can ignore, but just occasionally they have lasting significance. That is evolution.

All human beings are, in fact, born with dozens of mutations their parents lacked, and a few of those mutations could well be lethal if we didn't have two copies of every gene, so one can pick up the slack if the other malfunctions.

The secrets of evolution are death and time—the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

The first way that selection can cause ageing is to keep early-acting mutations rare in populations, while allowing ones with effects late in life to become common.

Based on their research, the Sanger scientists estimated that an embryo gains two or three new mutations every time its cells double.

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.

Based on estimates of the somatic mutation rate, some researchers have estimated that there might be over ten quadrillion new mutations scattered in each of us.

A final proof of our ideas can only be obtained by detailed studies on the alterations produced in the amino acid sequence of a protein by mutations of the type discussed here.

Clearly, we are a species that is well connected to other species. Whether or not we evolve from them, we are certainly very closely related to them. A series of mutations could change us into all kinds of intermediate species. Whether or not those intermediate species are provably in the past, they could easily be in our future.

You would think that UV just causes mutations, but it doesn't; you need a gene to be active for it.

First of all, many human diseases are influenced by, if not caused by mutations in genes.

During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists' understanding of mutations in DNA.

Our science and advisory board think that nuclear lamin dysfunction is a side-effect of DNA damage and mutations, rather than the cause. We are currently trying to mend nuclear dysfunction using Human Telomerase reverse transcriptase.

Everyone and everything we know and love. Thanks to a virus. We all carry mutations. Genetic mutations can give you laser vision. Or cancer. Or color blindness. Sometimes a mutation is on a DNA strand that doesn't do anything at all. And sometimes-- almost never-- a genetic mutation will cause an entire species to make an evolutionary leap forward. Think about it... a virus with powers. Sounds like something a biologist would want to protect.

Just as your own existence is unlikely and far from inevitable, the evolution of modern humans as a species depended on a whole string of chance events - some happening in the environments our ancestors inhabited, and some inside their own bodies, including random mutations in their DNA.

They were fortunate as I had a couple of unusual mutations in my mtDNA, which makes it very recognizable, but it was still somewhat shocking to find that my DNA had left a contaminating trail across the museums of Europe! As Alan Cooper is jokily fond of accusing paleoanthropologists, in terms of the contamination of fossils he has tried to study, "You are all very dirty people!

There's already a lot of active research going on using the Crispr technology to fix diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease. They're all diseases that have known genetic causes, and we now have the technology that can repair those mutations to provide, we hope, patients with a normal life.

Although not yet routine, many cancer centers have the technology to sequence some or all of a patient's cancer genome. This can provide massive amounts of valuable information about your cancer, including whether you have genetic mutations and other abnormalities for which new drugs are available.

There are certain mutations you can find across cancers in different organs.

Why does the path of institutional change differ across societies? The answer to this question lies in institutional drift. In the same way that the genes of two isolated populations of organisms will drift apart slowly because of random mutations in the so-called process of evolutionary or genetic drift, two otherwise similar societies will also drift apart institutionally—albeit, again, slowly.

World, world, O world! But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee/ Life would not yield to age.