Genome Quotes

“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'.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“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.”
― Freeman Dyson

“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.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“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.”
― Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

“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.”
― Frederick Sanger

“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.”
― Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

“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.”
― Lee Spetner

“Adam & Eve have been degraded, reduplicated forever, photocopies of photocopies, mistakes copied, magnified, augmented.”
― Johnny Rich, The Human Script

“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.”
― Matt Ridley

“In every cell in every body in every living thing, strings of words make sentences, meanings locked together”
― Johnny Rich, The Human Script

“The human genome is a life written in a book where every word has been written before. A story endlessly rehearsed.”
― Johnny Rich, The Human Script

“Parts of our genome simply cannot survive a situation where the environment suffers from the full overload of toxins we currently live in.”
― Kat Lahr, Parallelism Of Cyclicality

“Every new discovery about the genome is consistent with evolution having happened. Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a real part of the world.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“We are all mutants with ticking time bombs hidden inside”
― Lone Frank, My Beautiful Genome: Exposing Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time

“Right across the species, everything must be stored away and put under seal - including the famous genome - doubtless for the use of a later race, who will exploit it as fossil material. We shall ourselves, by the combined pressure of the mass of computer data and the continental drift, be transformed into a metamorphic deposit (the Unconscious already seems like a psychical residue of the Carboniferous). Right now, one has the impression the human race is merely turning in on itself and its origins, desperately gathering together its distress flares and dematerializing to transform itself into a message.
But a message to whom?

Everyone is looking for a safe area, some form of permanent plot that can eclipse existence as a primary abode and protect us from death. The unfortunate thing is there aren't even any plots held in perpetuity in the cemeteries any more.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Şu ana kadar bilinen evrimleşmiş ve doğada kullanılmış en küçük bellek cihazı, 'Candidatus Carsonella rudii bakterisinin 40 kb depolayabilen genomudur.”
― Max Tegmark, La vie 3.0 - Etre humain à l'ère de l'intelligence artificielle: Etre humain à l'ère de l'intelligence artificielle