Quotes About Genetics

If we understand the worm, we understand life.

If I were a worm, I would rather be the long-lived mutant than the normal worm, that's for sure.

It is unlikely that changes in telomeres are influencing the lifespan of the worm. That is because telomeres only shorten when cells divide. Most of the cells of the worm stop dividing when the worm becomes an adult.

The way to make a worm live longer is probably quite different from making a human live longer.

In the test tube, I can make any DNA I want, recombining it from monkeys, worms, anywhere. So I can explore new rules of breeding with molecules.

With worms you can just change genes at random and see if you can find a mutant that does what you want it to do.

There are lots of different strategies that an animal can use to survive. What a worm does is try to convert food into worms as soon as possible. In three days a single worm produces 300 progeny. So why put your resources into developing if you can make a brand-new worm in no time at all?

I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.

People's mood is really determined primarily by their genetic make-up and personality, and in the second place by their immediate context, and only in the third and fourth place by worries and concerns and other things like that.

If you took some famous religious leader, for example, and said it would be nice to clone them indefinitely so you have a dynasty of leaders, my own guess would be that each time the cloning takes place, they would become more and more defective, presumably mentally defective and subsequently worse.

My siblings and I have got the worst teeth in Britain.

If we want to make sense of our behavior - all the best, worst, and everything in between - we're not going to get anywhere if we think it can all be explained with one thing, whether it's one part of the brain, one childhood experience, one hormone, one gene, or anything.

DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.

Even if we never cure a single disease, the Human Genome Project and other ventures will have been worth it.

I'm at a slightly higher risk for type 2 diabetes, and my grandmother had diabetes. My hemoglobin a1c, which is one of the measures, started being a little high when I was drinking a ton of that coconut water.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was barely out of my teens. Like our olive skin tone and caterpillar eyebrows, I guess it just runs in the family.

It's funny because my mom is not a singer at all, nor is my father. But I definitely get more of my father's tone.

The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome.

Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.

In the past, when we've tried gene therapy, we haven't had tools that have allowed targeted gene correction.

As you can see me, genetically, my brothers and I are all kind of the same. We all have this chubby little appearance and we all have a sweet tooth, so our mother really tried her best to forbid this kind of stuff in our house.

We have 26,000 genes. But a blind, millimetre-long roundworm with only 959 cells in total already has over 19,000.

Every batch of sperm represents an opportunity for genetic typos - called de novo mutations - to be passed on. A 20-year-old man and woman will each pass on about 20 de novo mutations to a baby they conceive. By the time the couple is 40, a woman's total has remained at 20, while a man's has jumped to 65 - and it keeps climbing from there.

Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it's a very small percentage of the total. That's been changing in the last few years.