Quotes About Genetics

Life is a river, she repeated. Only in the most literal sense are we born on the same day we leave our mother's womb. In the larger, truer sense, we are born of the past--connected to its fluidity, both genetically and experimentally.

The invention of CRISPR and the plague of COVID will hasten our transition to the third great revolution of modern times. These revolutions arose from the discovery, beginning just over a century ago, of the three fundamental kernels of our existence: the atom, the bit, and the gene.

The evolutionary process cares little about what happens to us after we have children and get them to a safe age, so there are a whole bunch of middle-aged maladies, including Huntington's and most forms of cancer, that we humans would want to eliminate, even though nature sees no need to.

four bases in DNA: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, now commonly known by the letters A, T, G, and C.

The Ethics of Genetic Control. "As we learn to direct mutations medically, we should do so. Not to control when we can is immoral.

Mojica was driving home from his lab one evening when he came up with the name CRISPR, for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.

Someday we may consider it unethical not to use germline editing to alleviate human suffering.

DNA doesn't do much work. It mainly stays at home in the nucleus of our cells, not venturing forth. Its primary activity is protecting the information it encodes and occasionally replicating itself.

RNA, on the other hand, actually goes out and does real work. Instead of just sitting at home curating information, it makes real products, such as proteins.

But she became more interested in DNA's less-celebrated sibling, RNA. It's the molecule that actually does the work in a cell by copying some of the instructions coded by the DNA and using them to build proteins.

We now have the power to control our genetic future, which is awesome and terrifying.

He named these "CRISPR-associated," or Cas, enzymes.

the sequence of letters in the DNA did not reveal how it worked; what was important was

Some people born to be fat.

I didn't want to find out that instead of getting my powers from a transcendent scientist-mentor, I was grown from the DNA of Aryan super-athletes and Hitler's personal sex midgets! I didn't even know Hitler had personal sex midgets!

Under this hypothesis, genetically-grounded personality differences widen in the most gender-egalitarian societies for the simplest of reasons: Both sexes become freer to do what comes naturally.

Most recently, the task of assembling the genetic story for specific phenotypic traits has begun. It is still in its early stages, but progress is accelerating nonlinearly. Hence the nervousness that has prevented open discussion of what's going on in the geneticists' parallel universe: the fear that we will discover scary population differences in what I have called cognitive repertoires.

Biology is not going to put us out of business. The new knowledge that geneticists and neuroscientists are providing, conjoined with the kinds of analyses we do best, will enable us to take giant strides in understanding how societies, polities, and economies really function. We are like physicists at the outset of the nineteenth century, who were poised at a moment in history that would produce Ampères and Faradays.

Page 39: Among people of the four races with IQs of 100, 70 percent are European or Asian. For IQs of 115, 85 percent. For IQs of 125, 90 percent. For IQs of 140, 96 percent.

natural selection has almost become irrelevant in human evolution. There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we've built with the same body and brain."6

Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!

You and I share the same DNA. Is there anything more lonely than that?

Gay rights aren't predicated on being born gay or having the right gene. Gay rights are predicated on having choice and consent. If you're a man and you can find another man that consents to have sex with you, it's the consent that gives you the right to have sex with him. Genetics are irrelevant when it comes to sexual rights. Just as gay rights are based on choice and consent, so are prostitution rights. All sexual rights are based on choice and consent.

All my children inherited perfect pitch.