Quotes About Genetics

We use words like sister and aunt as if they describe rigid laws of biology. But despite our genetic essentialism, these laws are really only rules of thumb. Under the right conditions, they can be readily broken.

If you stop and think through what it means to grow, the process is astonishing. Each part of the body has to change its shape and size to match every other part. There's no central blueprint for the construction of an adult human. Each cell has to decide for itself, using nothing more than chemical signals and its own network of genes, RNA molecules, and proteins.

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

Today's Europeans are fairly uniform, genetically speaking. But that uniformity came out of a biological blender.

The "whole problem of heredity has undergone a complete revolution," Bateson declared. Mendel's discoveries could at last mature into a true science. Bateson christened it genetics.

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.

If I could compare cells from my left and right hands, they would not be genetically identical, but they would be vastly more similar to each other than to any cell from my brother, Ben.

Trudno wyobrazi? sobie, ?e rak ma cokolwiek wspólnego z ró?owym grapefruitem. A jednak oba sÄ… produktami mozaicyzmu: ?ywych linii komórkowych ró?niÄ…cych siÄ™ od reszty ciaÅ'a mutacjami, które odziedziczyÅ'y po komórkach macierzystych.

We have the technology right now to effectively eradicate Huntington's disease from the planet, along with many other genetic disorders. But the messy realities of human existence--of economics, emotions, politics, and the rest--override the technological possibilities.

In the early 1900s, a Florida farmer found a notable bud sport while inspecting his grove of Walters grapefruit trees. Tree after tree bore white fruit, except one. On that tree, the farmer spotted a branch weighed down with pink fruits. From that single bud sport, all pink grapefruits descend.

When a cell divides, it needs another army of molecules to make a second copy of its DNA.

Everybody's genome is like a book with 23 chapters," he told them. "You have two copies of each chapter, one from your dad and one from your mom. Whole genome sequencing looks for everything. It looks for missing chapters, missing paragraphs, every misspelled word.

Le tournant fut annoncé en 1931 par un ouvrage de Julian Huxley, zoologue à l'université de Londres (et frère du romancier Aldous Huxley). Il y rejette, précisément au nom de la génétique, la notion de race, « terme de pure convenance pour aider à appréhender la diversité humaine10 ».

If you find yourself considering who to take for a lover because of his ability to defend you, you're getting pretty close to selecting a mate because you think he has desirable traits to pass along to future generations.

I have a lot of my mother in me, but I was just born with the same parts as my father. I don't sound like him. I mean, I can do an impression of him right now, and I do not sound like him. I sound like me. My sense of rhythm I learned from my mother. My melodies, I think sometimes, I get from my mother.

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.

I try not to read the stuff online because it's so hurtful and stuff. There was somebody that said I was messing up my genetics by dating my boyfriend because he's not black. It was an interesting thing to read.

I'm very lucky with my metabolism.

People tend to think that metabolism is genetically predetermined. That you're either cursed or you're blessed. And that's not true.

I am just lucky to be blessed with a good metabolism.

I'm lucky to have a fast metabolism, so I haven't had to exercise much.

I know that whatever is left of the planet when the pillage ends that's the world that the children will live in. Whatever genetic song lines, whatever fragments of whale squeal and shattered harmonies are life, that's what evolution has got to work with. Music is the trembling urgency and exuberance of life ongoing.

Family history of anxiety, depression,

Human pigmentation is contained solely in the epidermis, the skin's outer layer. Lose the epidermis, we all look Scandinavian