Genome Quotes

#51. One key lesson learned from mapping the genome is that access to a rough initial map proved crucial to developing more detailed maps of small individual human differences. #Quote by Gary F. Marcus

#52. The human genome contains so much data that, it has been calculated, it would fill 43 volumes of Webster's International Dictionary. #Quote by Iain McGilchrist

#53. One of the responsibilities faced by the Environmental Genome Project is to provide the science base upon which society can make better informed risk management decisions. #Quote by Samuel Wilson

#54. Anybody that thought the genome was going to directly provide drugs was a fool. Biological networks are not simple, and making drugs to affect them won't be simple. #Quote by Leroy Hood

#55. We have Borna virus genes. We're part Borna virus, which is weird, but apparently our cells and our genomes in a weird way might actually be grabbing these viruses, grabbing genetic material from the viruses that are infecting it and pulling them into their own genome. #Quote by Carl Zimmer

#56. Once a genetic component has been established, the search for the genes involved can begin. This is a time-consuming and complex process that has recently been greatly facilitated by the information obtained by the Human Genome Project.51 #Quote by Joseph E. Ledoux

#57. We're collecting about 100,000 telomere lengths in saliva samples and then looking at how those relate to both the extensive longitudinal clinical records that Kaiser is collecting and the genome sequence variations. #Quote by Elizabeth Blackburn

#58. Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them. #Quote by Craig Venter

#59. Unlike some other immune-system gene families, whose genes are all clustered together on one chromosome, the 10 human TLR genes are distributed between five chromosomes. This reflects the ancient, invertebrate origin of the Toll-like receptors, which were present before the two genome-wide duplications that occurred during the early evolution of the vertebrates around 500 million years ago. On the basis of sequence similarities, the Toll-like receptors form four evolutionary lineages (I, II, III, and IV) that are descendants of the four Toll-like receptor loci formed by these two ancient genome duplications. #Quote by Peter Parham

#60. Medicine will be personalized and preventive: Your genome might predict that you have an 80 percent chance of breast cancer by the time you are 50, but if you take a preventive drug starting when you are 40, the chance will drop to 2 percent. #Quote by Leroy Hood

#61. If you're looking for your own idea of your own identity you know the human genome may not be the best place to look for it. You're just looking at a bunch of viruses. #Quote by Carl Zimmer

#62. The bigger question now becomes, "so what? Who cares?" You will never have an infinite number of balls and you will never have a large enough urn to hold all of them. You will never build a lamp that can turn on and off arbitrarily fast. We cannot investigate time or space past a certain smallness, except when pretending, so what are supertasks, but recreational fictions, entertaining riddles? We can ask more questions than we can answer, so what?

Well, here's what. Neanderthals. Neanderthals and humans, us, Homo sapiens, lived together in Europe for at least five thousand years. Neanderthals were strong and clever, they may have even intentionally buried their dead, but for hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals barely went anywhere. They pretty much just explored and spread until they reached water or some other obstacle and then stopped. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, didn't do that. They did things that make no sense crossing terrain and water without knowing what lay ahead. Svante Pääbo has worked on the Neanderthal genome at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and he points out that technology alone didn't allow humans to go to Madagascar, to Australia. Neanderthals built boats too. Instead, he says, there's "some madness there. How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it's ridiculous. And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now #Quote by Michael Stevens From VSauce

#63. Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea. #Quote by Harvey V. Fineberg

#64. The genome of every human cell has memory. You know what that means? As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own. #Quote by E.L. Doctorow

#65. In a 2006 study, the geneticist Jonathan Pritchard and his colleagues at the University of Chicago announced that there were at least seven hundred regions of the human genome that had clearly undergone positive selection in the last five thousand to fifteen thousand years. Some of the genes affect taste, smell, digestion, and brain function. It is thought that some of these changes resulted from the pressures involved in moving from a hunting-gathering lifestyle to a more agriculture based one. #Quote by Christine Kenneally

#66. There is increasing evidence that at least some of the targeting of epigenetic modifications can be explained by interactions with long ncRNAs. Jeannie Lee and her colleagues have recently investigated long ncRNAs that bind to a complex of proteins. The complex is called PRC2 and it generates repressive modifications on histones. PRC2 contains a number of proteins, and the one that interacts with the long ncRNAs is probably EZH2. The researchers found that the PRC2 complex bound to literally thousands of different long ncRNA molecules in embryonic stem cells from mice13. These long ncRNAs may act as bait. They can stay tethered to the specific region of the genome where they are produced, and then attract repressive enzymes to shut off gene expression. This happens because the repressive enzyme complexes contain proteins like EZH2 that are capable of binding to RNA. #Quote by Nessa Carey

#67. If your personal genome sequence was written out longhand, it would be a three-billion-word book. The King James Version of the Bible has 783,137 words, so your genetic code is the equivalent of nearly four thousand Bibles. And if your personal genome sequence were an audio book and you were read at a rate of one double helix per second, it would take nearly a century to put you into words! #Quote by Mark Batterson

#68. People think that Celera's trying to patent the whole human genome because it's been used as - I guess people in Washington learn how to do political attacks, and so it gets used as a political weapon, not as a factual one. #Quote by Craig Venter

#69. The mind drives the body, which drives the genome. #Quote by Matt Ridley

#70. Ours is not a dumb species. We have put a man on the moon. We have unlocked the secrets of the human genome. We have discovered how to take stem cells and coax them into becoming brain cells, heart muscle, liver tissue - any organ of the human body that needs repair. These are our miracles, and there are more. Yet we have not yet found a way to do the simplest things: To live in peace. To stop killing each other when we disagree. To distribute that which is good in life freely and fairly. #Quote by Neale Donald Walsch

#71. When we look at chimpanzees ... we get this extremely fine-grained view of evolution, and as a result we understand a lot more about the processes that are changing our own genome over time. #Quote by Bob Waterston

#72. The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years. #Quote by Matt Ridley

#73. At a time when we can split the atom, land on the moon, and decode the human genome, why do 2 billion people live on less than $2 a day? #Quote by Charles Wheelan

#74. History repeats itself, in part because the genome repeats itself. And the genome repeats itself, in part because history does. The impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires that drive human history are, at least in part, encoded in the human genome. And human history has, in turn, selected genomes that carry these impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires. This self-fulfilling circle of logic is responsible for some of the most magnificent and evocative qualities in our species, but also some of the most reprehensible. It is far too much to ask ourselves to escape the orbit of this logic, but recognizing its inherent circularity, and being skeptical of its overreach, might protect the week from the will of the strong, and the 'mutant' from being annihilated by the 'normal'. #Quote by Siddhartha Mukherjee

#75. Living in your genome is the history of our species. #Quote by Barry Schuler

#76. It appears that the human genome does indeed contain deserts, or large, gene-poor regions. #Quote by Craig Venter

#77. Simple organisms like bacteria tend more to the Airfix way of life. Their genes are fairly set, coding for just one protein. The more complex an organism becomes, the more the genome begins to resemble LEGO, with a much greater degree of flexibility in how the components are used. And when we think how extraordinary we humans are, it seems reasonable to say, in a nod to certain movie, that at the genetic level 'everything is awesome'. #Quote by Nessa Carey

#78. The very genetic determinism I posited in World's End as a way of shaking off my inherited demons is being proven in fact as we map out the human genome. #Quote by T.C. Boyle

#79. The decoding of the human genome tells us that we are indeed related to the animals, the insects, and the plants, and that, like it or not, Earth is where we belong. #Quote by Ian McCallum

#80. We're at the point where we don't need one genome or just a few genomes to interpret your genome. We need tens of thousands of genomes as a starting point, coupled with everything we can know about their physiology. It's only when we do that giant computer search, putting all that DNA together, that we will be able to make sense in a meaningful statistical manner of what your DNA is telling you. We're just at the start of trying to do that. #Quote by Anonymous

#81. I'm hoping that these next 20 years will show what we did 20 years ago in sequencing the first human genome, was the beginning of the health revolution that will have more positive impact in people's lives than any other health event in history. #Quote by Craig Venter

#82. I am thrilled to see my genome. #Quote by James D. Watson

#83. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful. #Quote by Francis Collins

#84. It might be extremely dorky to point out, but who you are is singular. It's science. No one else in existence has your point of view or exact genome (identical twins and clones, look for inspiration elsewhere, please). That is why we need people to share and help us understand one another better. And on a bigger level than just taking a selfie. (Not hating on selfies, but a few is enough. You look good from that angle; we get it.) We need the world to hear more opinions, give glimpses into more diverse subcultures. Are you REALLY into dressing your cat in handcrafted, historically authentic outfits? No problem, there are people out there who want to see that! Probably in excruciating detail! #Quote by Felicia Day

#85. It will be the mother of all telescopes, and you can bet it will do for astronomy what genome sequencing is doing for biology. The clumsy, if utilitarian, name of this mirrored monster is Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST. You can't use it yet, but a peak in the Chilean Andes has been decapitated to provide a level spot for placement. #Quote by Seth Shostak

#86. This was the first time anyone suggested the genome was an information store measurable in bits. Shannon's guess was conservative, by at least four orders of magnitude. #Quote by James Gleick

#87. I think I've achieved some good things; doing the first genome in history - my team on that was phenomenal and all the things they pulled together; writing the first genome with a synthetic cell; my teams at the Venter Institute, Human Longevity, and before that Celera. #Quote by Craig Venter

#88. It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding mirror neurons and their function. They may well be central to social learning, imitation, and the cultural transmission of skills and attitudes - perhaps even of the pressed-together sound clusters we call words. By hyperdeveloping the mirror-neuron system, evolution in effect turned culture into the new genome. Armed with culture, humans could adapt to hostile new environments and figure out how to exploit formerly inaccessible or poisonous food sources in just one or two generations - instead of the hundreds or thousands of generations such adaptations would have taken to accomplish through genetic evolution.

Thus culture became a significant new source of evolutionary pressure, which helped select brains that had even better mirror-neuron systems and the imitative learning associated with them. The result was one of the many self-amplifying snowball effects that culminated in Homo sapiens, the ape that looked into its own mind and saw the whole cosmos reflected inside. #Quote by V.S. Ramachandran

#89. I am suggesting here that organisms have a built-I capability of adapting to their environment. I am suggesting that to the extent that evolution occurs, it occurs at the level of the organism. This suggestion differs sharply from the thesis of the NDT, which holds that evolution occurs only at the level of the population. Organisms contain within themselves the information that enables them to develop a phenotype adaptive to a variety of environments. The adaptation can occur by a change in the genome through a genetic change triggered by the environment, or it can occur without any genetic change. #Quote by Lee Spetner

#90. I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt. #Quote by Thomas Friedman

#91. We have learned nothing from the genome. #Quote by Craig Venter

#92. 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 #Quote by Matt Ridley

#93. We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party. #Quote by Lewis Thomas

#94. If you think being descended from apes is bad for your self esteem, then get used to the idea that you are also descended from viruses. #Quote by Matt Ridley

#95. How does the body push the comparatively tiny genome so far? Many researchers want to put the weight on learning and experience, apparently believing that the contribution of the genes is relatively unimportant. But though the ability to learn is clearly one of the genome's most important products, such views overemphasize learning and significantly underestimate the extent to which the genome can in fact guide the construction of enormous complexity. If the tools of biological self-assembly are powerful enough to build the intricacies of the circulatory system or the eye without requiring lessons from the outside world, they are also powerful enough to build the initial complexity of the nervous system without relying on external lessons.

The discrepancy melts away as we appreciate the true power of the genome. We could start by considering the fact that the currently accepted figure of 30,000 could well prove to be too low. Thirty thousand (or thereabouts) is, at press time, the best estimate for how many protein-coding genes are in the human genome. But not all genes code for proteins; some, not counted in the 30,000 estimate, code for small pieces of RNA that are not converted into proteins (called microRNA), of "pseudogenes," stretches of DNA, apparently relics of evolution, that do not properly encode proteins. Neither entity is fully understood, but recent reports (from 2002 and 2003) suggest that both may play some role in the all-important process of regul #Quote by Gary F. Marcus

#96. I would only once have the opportunity to let my scientific career encompass a path from the double helix to the three billion steps of the human genome. #Quote by James D. Watson

#97. A lot of people think PMI is the genome project 2.0. No. This is about all the influences on disease - genetics is in there, but the environment is in there as well, health choices, behaviors, all the factors that are important, otherwise we're not doing what we promised we would do - which is in a holistic way look at how people stay healthy or how do they fall ill. #Quote by Francis Collins

#98. If you look on the fungal genome as being soldier candidates protecting the U.S. as our host defense, not only for the ecosystem but for our population ... we should be saving our old-growth forests as a matter of national defense. #Quote by Paul Stamets

#99. An increasing number of devices allow people to collect data about themselves: blood sugar levels, the number of steps taken each day, and sleep cycles. It won't be long before checking blood work will only require a relatively inexpensive device that plugs into a smartphone, not a visit to the doctor's office. The cost of sequencing the genome continues to drop, and soon it will be as unremarkable as taking a fingerprint. #Quote by John Durant

#100. As the leader of the international Human Genome Project, which had labored mightily over more than a decade to reveal this DNA sequence, I stood beside President Bill Clinton in the East Room of the White House...

Clinton's speech began by comparing this human sequence map to the map that Meriwether Lewis had unfolded in front of President Thomas Jefferson in that very room nearly two hundred years earlier.

Clinton said, "Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind." But the part of his speech that most attracted public attention jumped from the scientific perspective to the spiritual. "Today," he said, "we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift."

Was I, a rigorously trained scientist, taken aback at such a blatantly religious reference by the leader of the free world at a moment such as this? Was I tempted to scowl or look at the floor in embarrassment? No, not at all. In fact I had worked closely with the president's speechwriter in the frantic days just prior to this announcement, and had strongly endorsed the inclusion of this paragraph.

When it came time for me to add a few words of my own, I echoed this sentiment: "It's a happy day for the world. It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruct #Quote by Francis S. Collins

#101. There is also a trilogy of books out. I started reading right after Christmas Divergent. I went to read Insurgent after, and now I'm on the third one. I don't know, it's Detergent or whatever. But it's written by a 26-year-old girl. It's brilliant. But I'm about halfway through now on book number three. Wait until you get to book number three. Hello, Google genome project.

Technology is advancing at a rapid pace, and yet, morality and ethics are afterthoughts. We're excited about discovery and advancement, you know? We're in fact so excited that we don't even take the time to discuss or debate the moral dilemmas and implications of new technology. Sure, we're still in control of technology now, but does there come a time when we're not? Who will be the one that says turn it off? When do things go wrong?

I don't see anyone at Google or in the government or anyone at the forefront of technology boom that is contemplating the ethics and morality issues. Now that is a truly scary thought that doesn't come in a movie. #Quote by Glenn Beck

#102. To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough. #Quote by Freeman Dyson

#103. There's always a question when you invest. Are you too early, are you too late, or are you just right? And there was a lot of hype about life sciences, around the sequencing of the human genome and a lot of people concluded that's not really there. But by the way, there was a lot of hype around the digital revolution just about the time of 2000 and the human genome, and it turns out that some of the world's biggest, most powerful companies are the survivors post that crash. #Quote by Juan Enriquez

#104. Since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast into space in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth. Whether there is any creature out there capable of making sense of the instructions in my genome, well, that's another question. #Quote by Craig Venter

#105. Geneticists experienced a comparable shock when, contrary to their expectations of over 120,000 genes, they found that the entire human genome consists of approximately 25,000 genes. (Pennisi 2003a and 2003b; Pearson 2003; Goodman 2003) More than eighty percent of the presumed and required DNA does not exist! The missing genes are proving to be more troublesome than the missing eighteen minutes of the Nixon tapes. The one-gene, one-protein concept was a fundamental tenet of genetic determinism. Now that the Human Genome Project has toppled the one-gene for one-protein concept, our current theories of how life works have to be scrapped. No longer is it possible to believe that genetic engineers can, with relative ease, fix all our biological dilemmas. There are simply not enough genes to account for the complexity of human life or of human disease. #Quote by Bruce H. Lipton

#106. In addition, seculars do not sanctify any group, any person or any book as if it and it alone has sole custody of the truth. Instead, secular people sanctify the truth wherever it may reveal itself – in ancient fossilised bones, in images of far-off galaxies, in tables of statistical data, or in the writings of various human traditions. This commitment to the truth underlies modern science, which has enabled humankind to split the atom, decipher the genome, track the evolution of life, and understand the history of humanity itself #Quote by Yuval Noah Harari

#107. The best way to figure out what Perl is used for is to look at the ... Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (the CPAN, for short). ... [Y]ou'll get the impression that Perl has interfaces to almost everything in the world. With a little thought, you may figure out the reason Perl has interfaces to everything is not so much so Perl itself can talk to everything, but so Perl can get everything in the world talking to everything else in the world. The combinatorics are staggering. The very first issue of The Perl Journal ... contained an article entitled 'How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project'. It explains how all the different genome sequencing laboratories used different databases with different formats, and how Perl was used to massage the data into a cohesive whole. #Quote by Larry Wall

#108. One of the good things about the public Human Genome Project is that the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health spent a part of their budget on the ethical, legal, and social implications of their research. #Quote by Juan Enriquez

#109. Imagine that the genome is a book.
There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES.
Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called GENES.
Each story is made up of paragraphs, called EXTONS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS.
Each paragraph is made up of words, called CODONS.
Each word is written in letters called BASES. #Quote by Matt Ridley

#110. Cancer, we have discovered, is stitched into our genome. Oncogenes [cancer causing cells] arise from mutations in essential genes that regulate the growth of cells. Mutations accumulate in these genes when DNA is damaged by carcinogens, but also by seemingly random errors in copying genes when cells divide. The former might be preventable, but the latter is endogenous [originating from within]. Cancer is a flaw in our growth, but this flaw is deeply entrenched in ourselves. We can rid ourselves of cancer, then, only as much as we can rid ourselves of the processes in our physiology that depend on growth - aging, regeneration, healing, reproduction. #Quote by Siddhartha Mukherjee

#111. Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs. #Quote by Adam Savage

#112. The mouse genome is an invaluable tool to interpret the human genome. #Quote by Craig Venter

#113. Despite the advancements of systematic experimental pipelines, literature-curated protein-interaction data continue to be the primary data for investigation of focused biological mechanisms. Notwithstanding the variable quality of curated interactions available in public databases, the impact of inspection bias on the ability of literature maps to provide insightful information remains equivocal. The problems posed by inspection bias extend beyond mapping of protein interactions to the development of pharmacological agents and other aspects of modern biomedicine. Essentially the same 10% of the proteome is being investigated today as was being investigated before the announcement of completion of the reference genome sequence. One way forward, at least with regard to interactome mapping, is to continue the transition toward systematic and relatively unbiased experimental interactome mapping. With continued advancement of systematic protein-interaction mapping efforts, the expectation is that interactome 'deserts', the zones of the interactome space where biomedical knowledge researchers simply do not look for interactions owing to the lack of prior knowledge, might eventually become more populated. Efforts at mapping protein interactions will continue to be instrumental for furthering biomedical research. #Quote by Joseph Loscalzo

#114. The beauty in the genome is of course that it's so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data ... which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire living biosphere, that's the assemblage of 20 million species or so that constitute all the living creatures on the planet, and you have a genome for every species the total is still about one petabyte, that's a million gigabytes - that's still very small compared with Google or the Wikipedia and it's a database that you can easily put in a small room, easily transmit from one place to another. And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data. #Quote by Freeman Dyson

#115. The gene contains a single 'word', repeated over and over again: CAG, CAG, CAG, CAG ... The repetition continues sometimes just six times, sometimes thirty, sometimes more than a hundred times. Your destiny, your sanity and your life hang by the thread of this repetition. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-five times or fewer, you will be fine.
Most of us have about ten to fifteen repeats. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-nine times or more, you will in mid-life slowly start to lose your balance, grow steadily more incapable of looking after yourself and die prematurely. #Quote by Matt Ridley

#116. It turns out that viruses evolve from each other, like everything else. So if you look at the evolutionary tree of viruses, you can find parts of their genome that haven't changed over evolutionary time. You can recognize what may be a new virus by identifying this little piece of their genome that hasn't changed and is represented on the chip. #Quote by Joseph DeRisi

#117. The world has been changing even faster as people, devices and information are increasingly connected to each other. Computational power is growing and quantum computing is quickly being realised. This will revolutionise artificial intelligence with exponentially faster speeds. It will advance encryption. Quantum computers will change everything, even human biology. There is already one technique to edit DNA precisely, called CRISPR. The basis of this genome-editing technology is a bacterial defence system. It can accurately target and edit stretches of genetic code. The best intention of genetic manipulation is that modifying genes would allow scientists to treat genetic causes of disease by correcting gene mutations. There are, however, less noble possibilities for manipulating DNA. How far we can go with genetic engineering will become an increasingly urgent question. We can't see the possibilities of curing motor neurone diseases - like my ALS - without also glimpsing its dangers.
Intelligence is characterised as the ability to adapt to change. Human intelligence is the result of generations of natural selection of those with the ability to adapt to changed circumstances. We must not fear change. We need to make it work to our advantage.
We all have a role to play in making sure that we, and the next generation, have not just the opportunity but the determination to engage fully with the study of science at an early level, so that we can go on to fulfil our pote #Quote by Stephen Hawking

#118. I think that the idea of people wanting to steal your genome remains a little bit in the world of science fiction. It's a new technology, and it's new science that people are becoming familiar with. It's critical for us to do everything we can to enable the privacy level that people want. #Quote by Anne Wojcicki

#119. Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime - by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from? #Quote by Sam Harris

#120. Cancer, perhaps, is an ultimate perversion of genetics - a genome that becomes pathologically obsessed with replicating itself. The #Quote by Siddhartha Mukherjee

#121. The human genome is a life written in a book where every word has been written before. A story endlessly rehearsed. #Quote by Johnny Rich

#122. I didn't want my genome to be sequenced by any of the companies that were out there doing the partial sequences just from the point of view of commercialisation. #Quote by Leroy Hood

#123. The ever quickening advances of science made possible by the success of the Human Genome Project will also soon let us see the essences of mental disease. Only after we understand them at the genetic level can we rationally seek out appropriate therapies for such illnesses as schizophrenia and bipolar disease. #Quote by James D. Watson

#124. The food we eat goes beyond its macronutrients of carbohydrates, fat and protein. It's information. It interacts with and instructs our genome with every mouthful, changing genetic expression. #Quote by David Perlmutter

#125. I think there are people who's lives have been saved because of the study of the genome. #Quote by Francis Collins

#126. It's terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by the intelligent layman. I want everyone who bought a copy of 'A Brief History of Time' to buy a copy of 'Genome'. #Quote by Matt Ridley

#127. We share half our genes with the banana. #Quote by Robert May, Baron May Of Oxford

#128. Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable. #Quote by Kenneth R. Miller

#129. The dirty little secret of genomics is that we still know next to nothing about how a genome translates into the particularities of a living and breathing individual. If #Quote by Svante Paabo

#130. Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system. #Quote by Bill Gates

#131. The chemical interactions between many of these molecules are known, giving rise to genome-scale reconstructed biochemical reaction networks underlying cellular functions. #Quote by Bernhard O. Palsson

#132. What propels an embryo from one stage to the next-and makes one species different from another-is not a blueprint but rather an enormous autonomous library of the instructions contained within its genome. Each gene does double duty, specifying both a recipe for a protein and a set of regulatory conditions for when and where it should be built. Taken together suites of these IF-THEN genes give cells the power to act as parts of complicated improvisational orchestras. Like real musicians, what they play depends on both their own artistic impulses and what the other members of the orchestra are playing. As we will see in the next chapter, every bit of this process-from the Cellular Big 4 to the combination of regulatory cues-holds as much for development of the brain as it does for the body. #Quote by Gary F. Marcus

#133. There is no real reason why Disney should not buy up the human genome, which is currently being sequenced, to turn it into a genetic attraction. Why not cryogenize the whole planet, exactly as Walt Disney had himself cryogenized in liquid nitrogen, with a view to some kind of resurrection or other in the real world? But there no longer is a real world, and there won't be one – not even for Walt Disney: if he wakes up one day he'll get the shock of his life. In the meantime, from the depths of his liquid nitrogen he goes on annexing the world – both imaginary and real – subsuming it into the spectral universe of virtual reality in which we have all become extras. The difference is that, as we slip on our data suits or our sensors, or tap away at our keyboards, we are moving into living spectrality, whereas he, the brilliant precursor, has moved into the virtual reality of death. #Quote by Jean Baudrillard

#134. Mutations can arise anywhere in the genome, in gene DNA and noncoding DNA alike. But mutations to genes have bigger consequences: They can disable proteins and kill a creature. #Quote by Sam Kean

#135. When results are shared freely amongst the biological community, as has been done for the worm and the Human Genome Projects, specialist scientists can move much more rapidly towards their goals. #Quote by John Sulston

#136. I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced. #Quote by James D. Watson

#137. A great surprise that emerges from the genome revolution is that in the relatively recent past, human populations were just as different from each other as they are today, but that the fault lines across populations were almost unrecognizably different from today. #Quote by David Reich

#138. The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections. #Quote by Francis Collins

#139. In place of a view of the genome as a static blueprint that operates independently of experience and only up to the moment of birth, we have come to understand the genome as a complex, dynamic set of self-regulating recipes that actively modulate every step of life. Nature is not a dictator hell-bent on erecting the same building regardless of the environment, but a flexible Cub Scout prepared with contingency plans for many occasions. #Quote by Gary F. Marcus

#140. We can't any longer have the conventional understanding of genetics which everybody peddles because it is increasingly obvious that epigenetics - actually things which influence the genome's function - are much more important than we realised. #Quote by Robert Winston

#141. In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple days of hopelessness. Future scientists will call it the Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case history of chasing rainbows. #Quote by Chuck Palahniuk

#142. Realize this, though. Half my genes run through your body, and my selfish genome is heavily evolutionarily pre-programmed to look out for its copies. The other half is copied from the man I admire most in all the worlds and time, so my interest is doubly riveted. The artistic combination of the two, shall we say, arrests my attention. #Quote by Lois McMaster Bujold

#143. Parts of our genome simply cannot survive a situation where the environment suffers from the full overload of toxins we currently live in. #Quote by Kat Lahr

#144. It is a testament to the unsettling beauty of the genome that it can make the real world "stick". Our genes do not keep spitting out stereotypical responses to idiosyncratic environments: if they did, we too would devolve into windup automatons. Hindu philosophers have long described the experience of "being" as a web - jaal. Genes form the threads of the web; the detritus that sticks is what transforms every individual web into a being. There is an exquisite precision in that mad scheme. Genes must carry out programmed responses to environments - otherwise, there would be no conserved form. But they must also leave exactly enough room for the vagaries of chance to stick. We call this intersection "fate". We call our responses to it "choice". An upright organism with opposable thumbs is thus built from a script, but built to go off script. We call one such unique variant of one such organism a "self. #Quote by Siddhartha Mukherjee

#145. During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project. #Quote by Sydney Brenner

#146. the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond. Speech #Quote by Steven Pinker

#147. Although not yet routine, many cancer centers have the technology to sequence some or all of a patient's cancer genome. This can provide massive amounts of valuable information about your cancer, including whether you have genetic mutations and other abnormalities for which new drugs are available. #Quote by Kathy Giusti

#148. You may discover that a certain sequence of letters in your autosomal DNA is typically found in someone with Finnish heritage or Korean ancestry. Only a few years ago the world of science was turned upside down when it was discovered that in ancient times two nonhuman species contributed to the human genome. #Quote by Christine Kenneally

#149. The Human Genome Project has given us a genetic parts list. #Quote by Leroy Hood

#150. Some software is actually pretty good, by any standard. Think of the Mars Rovers, Google, and the Human Genome Project. Now, that's quality software! #Quote by Bjarne Stroustrup

#151. Peace will come when it becomes irrelevant to strike out at people. When you see that it's striking out against your own genome. #Quote by Prince

#152. Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart - the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome. #Quote by Elizabeth Kolbert

#153. In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses. #Quote by Freeman Dyson

#154. The human genome is made up of some 20,300 genes. Out of which 736 genes are associated with temperament, a total of 709 related to general cognitive functions, 148 genes are related to higher cognitive functions and 48 genes are associated with deep meditation and 8 genes are related to witnessing consciousness. #Quote by Amit Ray

#155. By being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware. #Quote by Barry Schuler

#156. As was predicted at the beginning of the Human Genome Project, getting the sequence will be the easy part as only technical issues are involved. The hard part will be finding out what it means, because this poses intellectual problems of how to understand the participation of the genes in the functions of living cells. #Quote by Sydney Brenner

#157. I would like to do a series about sequencing the human genome, and also analyze more human diversity among other ethnic groups - a 'Faces of America 2.' #Quote by Henry Louis Gates

#158. As soon as the genome had been cmpletely decoded (which would be in a matter of months) humanity would have complete control of its evolution; when that happened sexuality would be seen for what it really was: a useless, dangerous, and regressive function. #Quote by Michel Houellebecq

#159. I want the key", he said. "The key to the universe. To life. To the future and the past. To love and hate. Truth. God. It's there. Inside of us. In the genome. The answer to every question. If I can find it. That's what I want," he finished, softly. "I want the key. #Quote by Jennifer Donnelly

#160. Recently, results of the Human Genome Project have shattered one of Science's fundamental core beliefs, the concept of genetic determinism. We have been led to believe that our genes determine the character of our lives, yet new research surprisingly reveals that it is the character of our lives that controls our genes. Rather than being victims of our heredity, we are actually masters of our genome. #Quote by Bruce H. Lipton

#161. Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic terms. When we read about the latest discovery of a link between a gene and a disease, we imagine that we've learned the cause of the disease, and we may even think we'll get a cure by fixing the gene. #Quote by Gary Wolf

#162. During the past thirteen billion years humanity has become an enormous presence on earth, as if it were an envelope surrounding the planet. All other species are now influenced by humanity, and humanity is literally determining the genome of the earth community. We affect how the rest of the planet survives - or not. The one notion that not only envelops but suffocates the planet is that of industrial growth, which inherently fosters the perspective of the earth as a resource rather than as a relationship we must cultivate. Humanity is now being challenged to replace the resource concept with a deeply emotional experience of the earth as a being with which we are related. #Quote by Carolyn Baker

#163. Your genome sequence will become a vital part of your medical record, thereby providing critical information about how to optimize your wellness. #Quote by Leroy Hood

#164. One of the big challenges now is to figure out just how many viruses there really are in the human genome. So far the estimate is 8.3% of our genome is virus, but it actually could be a lot higher. #Quote by Carl Zimmer

#165. Science has discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: 'all meanings depend on the key of interpretation.' What makes us human, and what makes each of us his or her own human, is not simply the genes that we have buried into our base pairs, but how our cells, in dialogue with our environment, feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves. Life is a dialectic. #Quote by Jonah Lehrer

#166. A mutation that reverses the effect of a previous one (called a back mutation) could at one stroke revive a complex function that had been earlier shut off. If you didn't know it was a back mutation you might be tempted to think it added a lot of information to the genome. But once you know that a single mutation cannot add more than one bit of information, you know that the complexity must have already been in the genome. The mutation must have turned 'ON' what had been an existing, but dormant, system. #Quote by Lee Spetner

#167. The genome was once thought to be just the blueprint for a living organism, like a combination of the architect's plan for a building and the builder's list of supplies. It specified the parts, the building blocks, and, somehow, the design of the whole, the way in which they are to be put together. #Quote by Iain McGilchrist

#168. Imagine if you looked different to every person who saw you. Not, like, some people thought you were more or less attractive, but one person thinks you're a sixty-five-year-old cowboy from Wyoming complete with boots and hat and leathery skin, and the next person sees an eleven-year-old girl wearing a baseball uniform. You have no control over this, and what you look like has nothing to do with the life you have lived or even your genome. You have no idea what each person sees when they look at you. That's what fame is like. You think this sounds like beauty because we sometimes that beauty is all in the eye of the one beholding the beauty. And, indeed, we don't get to decide if we are beautiful. Different people will have different opinions, and the only person who gets to decide if I'm attractive is the person looking at me. But then there is some consensus about what attractive is. Beauty is an attribute defined by human nature and culture. I can my eyes and my lips and my boobs when I look in a mirror. I know what I look like. Fame is not this way. A person's fame is in everyone's head except their own. You could be checking into your flight at the airport and 999 people will see you as just another face in the crowd. The thousandth might think you're more famous than Jesus. As you can imagine, this makes fame pretty disorienting. You never know who knows what. You never know if someone is looking at you because you went to college with them or because they've been watchi #Quote by Hank Green

#169. The bradys must hold that, on the average, cumulative selection has to add a little information to the genome at each step. But of all the mutations studied since genetics became a science, not a single one has been found that adds a little information. It is not impossible, in principle, for a mutation to add a little information, but it is improbable.
The NDT was an attractive theory. Unfortunately, it is based on the false speculation that many small random mutations could build up to large evolutionary changes. #Quote by Lee Spetner

#170. Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection? #Quote by Steven Pinker

#171. A DNA sequence for the genome of bacteriophage ΦX174 of approximately 5,375 nucleotides has been determined using the rapid and simple 'plus and minus' method. The sequence identifies many of the features responsible for the production of the proteins of the nine known genes of the organism, including initiation and termination sites for the proteins and RNAs. Two pairs of genes are coded by the same region of DNA using different reading frames. #Quote by Frederick Sanger

#172. I'm fascinated with genetic science, and I have been for a very long time. I always look at science and technology because I think that the developments in my lifetime have been so remarkable - and we're only at the tip of the iceberg with projects like decoding the human genome. #Quote by Nick Rhodes

#173. The genome could be thought of as a kind of piano with twenty-five thousand keys. In some cases, a few keys may be out of tune, which can cause the music to sound wrong. In others, if one key goes dead the music turns into a cacophony, or the whole piano self-destructs. #Quote by Richard Preston