Sam Kean Quotes

… the policy of genes

There's almost no food that isn't genetically modified. Genetic modification is the basis of all evolution. Things change because our planet is subjected to a lot of radiation, which causes DNA damage, which gets repaired, but results in mutations, which create a ready mixture of plants that people can choose from to improve agriculture.

It used to be thought that our genes were historically immutable and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics.

I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.

It's not going to fill in the potholes. It's not going to put a roof over people's heads. What it does is it helps to address really fundamental questions of who we are, where we came from, by which I mean we can learn how life came about.

Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.

Humans are mutants, everything's a mutant - things that evolve.

One of the things about genetics that has become clearer as we've done genomes - as we've worked our way through the evolutionary tree, including humans - is that we're probably much more genetic animals than we want to confess we are.

If we understand the worm, we understand life.

Genetics is all about showcasing human beauty along with high-quality performance.

Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.

We should place priority on the development of safeguards against unwise, permanent alterations in the human gene pool. Now that we have become principle agents of evolution, it is crucially important to recognize that the pursuit of short-term goals through human modification can be dangerously inconsistent with the long-term best interests of the human species.

I didn’t make him look like a chimpanzee. God made him look like a chimpanzee.

The elementary particles which form the embryo are each drawn from the corresponding structure in the parent, and conserve a sort of remembrance of their previous form, so that in the offspring they will reflect and reproduce a resemblance to the parents ... We can thus readily explain how new species are formed... by supposing that the elementary particles may not always retain the order which they present in the parents, but may fortuitously produce differences, which, multiplying and accumulating, have resulted in the infinite variety of species which we see at the present time.

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Genetic pollution is considerably more dangerous than oil spills. You can’t just go out there and put a boom around it and put it back in.

We used to think that our destiny is in the stars. Now we know that its in our genes, in our DNA.

Genetic engineering of are own species is not a question of if, but only a question of when….The human race may bifurcate into two subspecies of humans: Enhanced and Unenhanced.

What humans can't engineer, evolution can.

there is no doubt that anyone who had a fair knowledge of the principles of genetics, and who was given control over the matings of human beings, could in the course of a very few generations, produce a large number of very diverse types. He could breed a race of idiots, a race of dwarfs, a race of giants, an albino race, an insane race, a race of moral imbeciles, a race which would almost invariably get drunk in the presence of alcohol, a race of preeminent mental ability, or a race of unusual artistic talent. The task would be easy, as it would involve only the isolation of existing strains of the human species.

Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.

What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That's poetry as far as I'm concerned.

I thought we'd just sequence the genome once and that would be sufficient for most things in people's lifetimes. Now we're seeing how changeable and adaptable it is, which is why we're surviving and evolving as a species.

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can't do anything about them.

The great mystery of adaptation is that true fidelity can only be achieved through lavish promiscuity.