George M. Church Quotes

Most people, when they hear the disease name, it's all they know about it. It sounds so mild. When I first was sick, for the first 10 years or so, I was dismissed. I was ridiculed and told I was lazy. It was a joke.

I come with bad genetics, personally.

Society doesn't portray transsexual people in a very positive light.

We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one!

You're never going to get beyond other people's preconceptions of what you are and what you're about.

Identical twins are ideal lab specimens for studying the difference between learned and inherited traits since they come from the womb preloaded with matching genetic operating systems. Any meaningful differences in their behaviors or personalities are thus likely to have been acquired, not innate.

Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.

The whole thing is you don't want to be pigeon-holed as 'Oh, he's a guy in a wheel chair. He's very fragile. You better watch out.'

I have to expend an awful lot of energy actively undoing the impact of my name. Understandably, people assume that I have at least some connection to Iran. The truth is that I don't. I have very little knowledge about the culture, the language, the history. I've never been to Iran. I've never even been inside a mosque.

Every sleep doctor I've talked to said it was an urban legend that you shouldn't wake up a sleepwalker. All that will happen is that you will get condescended to.

Some genetic variants can be informative about one's risk for Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.

A few small changes in your DNA can turn your eyes blue, make you lactose intolerant or put some curl in your hair.

Stereotypes and perceptions have their real effects.

However superficial prevailing views of heredity seem to be, it must be admitted that a person is indeed the bearer of inherited characteristics. This is the one aspect. He must often battle against these inherited traits and rid himself of them in order to bring to fulfillment the talents laid into him before he entered earthly existence.

When you have a name that means scares, you have to live with that.

Fear and ignorance fuel so much homophobia.

I know people aren't sure about men who look like I do. People don't see the beard as a bit of hair. I've been shouted at, called some horrible names, and when I first came to Worcester I noticed people crossing the road to avoid me.

We don't have all this gay-bashing crime. You don't see that. It's not there. That is not really happening in Jamaica. But because a few artists basically sing it and put records out and the media runs with it, then the stigma becomes big, and now we're trapped with that whole thing. It's really sad.

When I pull my white Range Rover into disabled parking bays, the abuse that I get until I actually get out on my crutches is phenomenal, because people presume that you couldn't possibly be disabled and reverse a white Range Rover into that parking space.

I don't think many people stare at people in wheelchairs because we see it regularly. I suppose if you see more in the media it will take away the curiosity.

Genes are not about inevitabilities; they're about potentials and vulnerabilities.

There's stigmas attached to anything that makes you, in the public's eye, seem weak. So of course, you know, you're in a business where your image, and the way people perceive you, you are taught, is important.

When I came out, initially, I faced some mocking. For the first 10-15 days, sometimes when I was out in public, people would shout things like 'lesbian.'

Obviously, there's so many different types of gay people, but some people don't know that. Some people think we all look and act a certain type of way.

We separate problems with the brain into neurological and psychiatric, and it's because it's stigmatised still. Mental illness is still stigmatised. Imagine if we treated people with cancer like that. Just because your personality changes and your behaviour changes, all of a sudden you are put in a different category.