176 Quotes About Genetics

Very high altitude workers that have sea level adapted genetics are radiation workers.

The biologists are a ruthless bunch, and quite devoid of any particular regard for doctors. In theory they don’t even want a surgeon to patch up a man who has been hit on the head with a brick, the argument being that it is better for the human race to be able to dodge bricks. Which is a correct viewpoint, I suppose, unless it happens to be your head and your brick.

It wasn’t that we started to look at things because there was now a mechanism by which to see them. There first had to be a will to see, buried somewhere inside living things. Without it, the mechanism would never have taken shape.

TP53 seems to encode the greater good, like a suicide pill in the mouth of a soldier that dissolves only when it detects evidence that he is about to mutiny.

...because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralised process...no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbours. We do not organise societies that way...Perhaps we should try.

...it is entirely illogical to consider biology in dichotomous terms of genes and environment—all of biology is based on the continuous interaction of both.

The science of genetics is in a transition period, becoming an exact science just as the chemistry in the times of Lavoisier, who made the balance an indispensable implement in chemical research.

To the question of whether sharing 96% of our genetic make-up with chimps makes us 96 percent chimp; we also share about 50% of our DNA with bananas - that does not make us half bananas!

In the world of wild naturalism, there is nothing greater or higher than mortal survival tactics. Everything we do, we do as mortal beings with an unknowable date of death stuck on our head, or to be specific in the genetic clock.