Quotes About Genome

There was never a better illustration of the validity of the Enlightenment dream – that order can emerge where nobody is in charge. The genome, now sequenced, stands as emphatic evidence that there can be order and complexity without any management.

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

The genome is as complicated and indeterminate as ordinary life, because it is ordinary life. This should come as a relief. Simple determinism, whether of the genetics or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.

The mind drives the body, which drives the genome.

evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory put it, anyone who thinks he or she can assign a function to every letter in the human genome should be asked why an onion needs a genome that is about five times larger than a person's. Who's resorting

It reminds us that the genome, great book that it is, may give us the bleakest kind of self-knowledge: the knowledge of our destiny, not the kind of knowledge that you can do something about, but the curse of Tiresias.

In effect, since the process of natural selection is one of extracting useful information from the environment and encoding it in the genes, there is a sense in which you can look on the human genome as four billion years' worth of accumulated learning.

And there are genes that can be used to write the history of human migrations in the last few thousand years. From four billion years ago to just a few hundred years ago, the genome has been a sort of autobiography for our species, recording the important events as they occurred.

The genome is littered, one might almost say clogged, with the equivalent of computer viruses, selfish, parasitic stretches of letters which exist for the pure and simple reason that they are good at getting themselves duplicated.

the genome contains secret messages from both the distant and the recent past – from when we were single-celled creatures and from when we took up cultural habits such as dairy farming. It also contains clues to ancient philosophical conundrums, not least the question of whether and how our actions are determined and what is this curious sensation called free will.

Junk DNA - or, as scientists call it nowadays, noncoding DNA - remains a mystery: No one knows how much of it is essential for life.

What do cells do when they see a broken piece of DNA? Cells don't like such breaks. They'll do pretty much anything they can to fix things up. If a chromosome is broken, the cells will repair the break using an intact chromosome.

There have been lots of stories written about all the hype over getting the genome done and the letdown of not discovering lots of cures right after.

What I really wanted was for everybody to have their genome and, ideally, everybody to share their genome, and for that, we needed to bring the price way down.

Fifty percent of human DNA is identical to the DNA of a banana. —

Sometimes it is claimed by those who argue that race is just a social construct that the human genome project shows that because people share roughly 99% of their genes in common, that there are no races. This is silly.

For simplicity one can think of the + class as having one extra base at some point or other in the genetic message and the - class as having one too few.

People think genes are an absolute cause of traits. But the notion that the genome is the blueprint for humanity is a very bad metaphor. If you think we're hard-wired and deterministic, there should indeed be a lot more genes.

The convergence of information technology and biology allows scientists to translate the human genome into digital data that can accelerate diagnoses and cures.

We found that CAS9 has the ability to make a double-stranded break in DNA at sites that are programmed by a small RNA molecule. What was so important was that we could really show how the CAS9 protein worked.

The genome, as Eric Lander of MIT has put it, is like a parts list for the human body: it tells us what we are made of, but says nothing about how we work.

DNA molecule, as you will almost certainly remember from countless television programs if not school biology, is made up of two strands, connected by rungs to form the celebrated twisted ladder known as a double helix. Your DNA is simply an instruction manual for making you. A length of DNA is divided into segments called chromosomes and shorter individual units called genes. The sum of all your genes is the genome.

Creating a PCR test for a new pathogen is a pretty easy task once you've sequenced its genome. Because you already know what its genes look like, you can create the special substances, dye, and other necessary products very quickly—which is why researchers were able to establish PCR tests for COVID just twelve days after the first genome sequences were published.

There were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn't seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as "junk DNA," though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome "junk," given our level of ignorance.