Quotes About Genetics

The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

We enjoy the unique faculty of being able to act against natural selection. The problem is that, in order to do this, we must actively oppose some of our key genetic traits, surmount our own nature.

Because Y DNA and mtDNA don't get reshuffled with other DNA, they can be used to learn something about an individual in your family tree who lived 10,000, 50,000, or 100,000 years ago. That person is still there, in a sense, in you in a completely disproportionate way to the rest of your grandparents.

Despite the availability of testing, at least half of the population at risk for Huntington's disease still has children without making use of the new technologies. Even some of the people who have prenatal testing for Huntington's still have a profound reluctance to learn their own status. Couples who try preimplantation genetic diagnosis may even conceive a child and choose not to find out if the parent at risk has the mutation. Deciding

It is extremely unlikely that anyone in the twenty-first century does not have some consanguinity in his or her family within the last three hundred years. Yet according to Feldman, more than half of all human populations today still engage in consanguineous marriage, and up to 10 percent of all humans are in first- or second-cousin marriages.

If you built a time machine and traveled back four hundred years and, let's say for the sake of argument, found yourself in a romance with one of your sixteenth-grade grandmothers, the good news is that you can feel fine about having children together. However morally bizarre that might be, it would not be genetically problematic.

As of 2014 a small handful of well-known companies—Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, and AncestryDNA.com, as well as National Geographic's Genographic Project—and services offer a selection of DNA tests and genealogical connections to the general public.

not put in place, one wonders how insurance and pharmaceutical companies will treat our grandchildren if they have genetic information about them, perhaps even before they are even conceived. Insurance

At the same time that Lahn's results were published, another team of scientists based at the University of California, San Diego, announced the discovery of a positively selected gene called SIGLEC11 that is expressed in brain cells called microglia. Although they can't yet explain the effects of the gene, it is interesting because it is one of the very few found only in humans and not in our ape cousins. This could make it a candidate for explaining some of the differences between us and them.

This is because our personal genetic tree is not equivalent to our genealogical tree, which is to say that not every one of our direct ancestors has contributed to our genome.

Most curious is the way that Y/surname patterns differ between countries. In Britain, on average, a man who has the same surname as another is significantly more likely to have a similar Y chromosome, and therefore a common ancestor, than he would with someone of a different surname. But there's a twist: The Y similarity depends on the frequency of the surname within the population. If you are a Smith, for example, the rule does not apply.

If every chunk of DNA were halved with every generation, the result would be a rather neat picture of proportionately shrinking segments that matched an expanding fan of cousins. But if the cut and shuffle of DNA down through the generations is not a smooth, even process and relatively large chunks of DNA may be passed on through generations more or less unchanged, it has some interesting implications for what DNA can tell us about the past.

once spoke about the genetics of ancestry with a Holocaust historian who had hunted some of the last surviving Nazis in the 1990s. When I told him that little letters in our genetic code might testify to the ethnicity of our parents and grandparents, he said, "The Nazis would have loved this." They would certainly have seized upon the idea, but in the end the full picture would have let them down just as badly as all the other dubious measures of race they tried to develop.

There is evidence from ancient DNA that lighter skin, hair, and eye pigmentation was strongly selected for in Europe in just the last five thousand years.

Better: DNA, History, and Health The

Or, as Razib Khan, a geneticist and science blogger, put it, culture is chunky, whereas genes are creamy.

According to Ralph, based on the DNA you have in common, these distant cousins may be fifth cousins, but they might also be fifteenth cousins, and you may share a common ancestor much further back than you think.

Judged by single nucleotides polymorphisms (or SNP) in DNA, the difference between people and chimpanzees is 1.23 percent, compared to around 0.1 percent difference in SNPs between two randomly picked humans.

Chimpanzees look nearly human. They share most of their DNA with us. But we do research on them. We experiment on them and because they're not quite human, that's all right.

Genetics plays a role in determining who gets an anxiety disorder, what type it is (e.g., worry, compulsive

My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.

There is a lot of hype and fear about this much-talked-about prospect of designer babies.

Murder, like talent, seems occasionally to run in families.

People who are in a position of finding out that they're at risk for some illness, whether it's breast cancer, or heart disease, are afraid to get that information - even though it might be useful to them - because of fears that they'll lose their health insurance or their job.