Genome: The Autobiography Of A Species In 23 Chapters Quotes
"All forms that perish other forms supply, (By turns we catch the vital breath and die) Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne, They rise, they break, and to that sea return." - Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
"In the beginning was the word. The word proselytised the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever."
"Mock my zeal if you wish; consider me a ridiculous materialist for investing such enthusiasm in an acronym. But follow me on a journey back to the very origin of life, and I hope I can convince you of the immense fascination of the word."
"Life is a slippery thing to define, but it consists of two very different skills: the ability to replicate, and the ability to create order."
"The key to both of these features of life is information."
"The filament of DNA is information, a message written in a code of chemicals, one chemical for each letter."
"Anything that can use the resources of the world to get copies of itself made is alive; the most likely form for such a thing to take is a digital message – a number, a script or a word."
"In the beginning was the word. The word was not DNA. That came afterwards, when life was already established."
"Man with all his noble qualities still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." - Charles Darwin
"The genetic code, bar a few tiny local aberrations, mostly for unexplained reasons in the ciliate protozoa, is the same in every creature. We all use exactly the same language."
"If you have Huntington’s disease, you do not have time to wait."
"It is crushing to look at these exuberant children, full of hope and expectation... they are joyous and wild with life, until the disease attacks."
"The task has been arduous in the extreme, in this inhospitable terrain at the top of chromosome 4."
"The gene would prove impossible to find. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack the size of America."
"In the case of Huntington’s disease, the more glutamines there are at this point, the earlier in life the disease begins."
"It is but sorrow to be wise when wisdom profits not."
"The hereditarian fallacy is not the simple claim that IQ is to some degree ‘heritable’ but the equation of ‘heritable’ with ‘inevitable’."
"Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls must dive below."
"The tabula of human nature was never rasa."
"The world is not like that. It is a world of greys, of nuances, of qualifiers, of ‘it depends’."
"In other words, when ancestral human beings first evolved a language instinct, it grew in the region devoted to sound production and processing."
"No better proof could be adduced for William James’s nineteenth-century conjecture that human beings evolved their complex behaviour by adding instincts to those of their ancestors, not by replacing instincts with learning."
"The language instinct that we all possess is plainly one such complex adaptation, beautifully designed for clear and sophisticated communication between individuals."
"The evidence that grammar is innate is overwhelming and diverse."
"All human beings have a language instinct, whereas all monkeys do not, but that instinct does not develop equally well in all people."
"We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes."
"A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy."
"The genome is a scripture in which is written the past history of plagues."
"Your chances of avoiding death from malaria are pre-programmed in your genes, and in the genes of the malaria organism."
"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune – often the surfeit of our own behaviour, – we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion…an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star."
"Genetic resistance to disease is the last resort. There are all sorts of simpler ways of defeating disease."
"The genome is not the only battlefield."
"Each one exists as part of an enormous confederation called the body."
"The genome is as much under the control of the other two as they are controlled by it."
"Cholesterol – a word pregnant with danger."
"Cholesterol is an essential ingredient of the body."
"Steroids have been used by living creatures for so long that they probably pre-date the split between plants, animals, and fungi."
"Cortisol is used in virtually every system in the body."
"One of cortisol’s most surprising effects is that it suppresses the working of the immune system."
"The main purpose of most genes in the human genome is regulating the expression of other genes in the genome."
"If genes are involved in behaviour then it is they that are the cause and they that are deemed immutable."
"Social behaviour is not some external series of events that takes our minds and bodies by surprise."
"The surprising similarity of embryological genes in worms, flies, chicks, and people sings an eloquent song of common descent."
"Languages and peoples do, to some extent, go together."
"Languages spoken in Portugal and Korea are almost certainly descended from the same single tongue."
"The discovery of mouse–fly homology was bizarre enough, implying as it does that the mechanism of embryonic development requires the genes to be in the same order as the body parts."
"The gene maps are fuzzier than the linguistic maps, but this enables them to be subtler."
"The genetic geography of the world has a functional as well as a mapping contribution to make to the piecing together of history and pre-history."
"By taking up the sensible lifestyle of dairy herdsmen, human beings created their own evolutionary pressures."
"The genes can be induced to change by voluntary, free-willed, conscious action."
"One way round the problem [of lactose intolerance] is to let bacteria digest the lactose and turn the milk into cheese."
"The genome seems immortal. An unbroken chain of descent links the very first ur-gene with the genes active in your body now."
"Becoming an ancestor is difficult – indeed, natural selection requires it to be difficult."
"The genome does not tell the heart when to beat, nor the eye when to blink, nor the mind when to think."
"The human genome is a book. By reading it carefully from beginning to end... an accomplished modern Frankenstein could carry out the feat."
"The brain is created by genes. It is only as good as its innate design."
"The analogy [between body cells and bees in a hive] is far from specious."
"Mutation in the TP53 gene is almost the defining feature of a lethal cancer."
"The longer we live, the more mistakes we accumulate in our genes."
"One fatal malignancy per one hundred million billion cell divisions does not seem so bad after all."
"Little wonder that p53 has earned the nickname ‘Guardian of the Genome’, or even ‘Guardian Angel of the Genome’."
"The suicide of cells in this way is known as apoptosis, from the Greek for the fall of autumn leaves."
"The evidence for Lowe’s theory is good."
"So chemotherapy and radiation therapy are actually, like vaccination, treatments that work by helping the body to help itself."
"These insights are of great importance to the treatment of cancer."
"In the short term it promises a less painful death for many cancer patients."
"The story of p53 and the oncogenes, like much of my book, challenges the argument that genetic research is necessarily dangerous and should be curtailed."
"The geneticist Eric Lander recently raised an alarming possibility."
"The spectre of employers using genetic tests to screen potential staff is less fraught."
"Prion diseases are caused by a sort of chain reaction in which one prion converts its neighbour to its own shape and they each then convert another, and so on, exponentially."
"This offends our natural determinism, in which diseases must have causes, but we do not live in a fully determined world. Perhaps CJD just happens spontaneously at the rate of about one case per million people."
"Prions have humbled us with our ignorance."
"Personal and family tragedies, ethnological catastrophes and economic disasters can all be traced back to the mischievous misfolding of one small molecule."
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves."
"Children born with an extra chromosome 21 are healthy, conspicuously happy and destined to live for many years."
"The multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race."
"The father of eugenics, Francis Galton, was in many ways the opposite of his first cousin, Charles Darwin."
"Eugenics was not a politicised science; it was a science-ised political creed."
"Eugenics is like any other programme that puts the social benefit before the individual’s rights."
"We are back, in short order, to the debate on abortion and whether the mother has the right to abort a child, or the state the right to stop her."
"The possibility of choosing among embryos for special ability, rather than against lack of ability, may not be too far away."
"Hume’s fork: Either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them."
"Freedom lies in expressing your own determinism, not somebody else’s."