Genetic Mutations Quotes

Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code - with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It's very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.

The reason we have cancer and heart disease is the same reason you can't get rid of the wear and tear on your tires on your car: as soon as you use them, you are wearing them away. You can't make eternal tires, and it's the same with the human body.

Each part of our genome is unique. We would not be alive if there was not a single mathematical solution for our chromosomes. We would just be scrambled goo.

In our evolutionary narratives, the organism itself often seems to play a passive role: a powerless victim, almost, of changes to its environment or mutations in its genes.

The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.

The final and conclusive evidence against evolution is the fact that the Bible denies it.

Cancer cells come pre-programmed to execute a well-defined cascade of changes, seemingly designed to facilitate both their enhanced survival and their dissemination through the bloodstream. There is even an air of conspiracy in the way that tumours use chemical signals to create cancer-friendly niches in remote organs.

human genetics has taught us that when it comes to our telomerase, we humans live on a knife edge. OK, simply put, yes, nudging up telomerase does decrease the risks of some diseases, but it also increases the risks of certain and rather nasty cancers.

The human race has today the means for annihilating itself—either in a fit of complete lunacy ... or by a careless handling of atomic technology, through the slow poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.

The genome could be thought of as a kind of piano with twenty-five thousand keys. In some cases, a few keys may be out of tune, which can cause the music to sound wrong. In others, if one key goes dead the music turns into a cacophony, or the whole piano self-destructs.

This seems highly likely, especially as it has been shown that in several systems mutations affecting the same amino acid are extremely near together on the genetic map.

From deformed parents, deformed offspring come to be.

My genetics are good, but they aren't crazy He-Man style.

Aging is basically the build-up of error: error at the genetic level, error at the cellular level. Cells normally repair themselves; that's why you heal when you get a cut. But even the mechanism of repair eventually falls apart.

Life has survived for more than three billion years because it is robust, and almost no mutations can easily outwit the defense mechanisms built up through eons of exposure to potential pathogens.

Breast cancer isn't one disease - it's probably four or five different types, and without knowing what type a person has, you can't optimize treatment for them.

The Human Genome Project has given us a genetic parts list.

In the beginning of the human race there was no genetic load which would cause undesirable traits such as appear in offspring of marriages between relatives today.

Transposons are just small pieces of DNA that randomly insert in the genetic code. And if they insert in the middle of the gene, they disrupt its function.

And, as if nature were protecting man against his own ingenuity, the reproductive processes were affected for a time; men became sterile, women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped.

I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

There are environmental threats to health; there are internal threats to health - genetic conditions, viral threats, diseases like cancer and Parkinson's. And then there are societal and global ones, like poverty and lack of nutrition. And unknown viral threats - everything from a new kind of influenza to hemorrhagic fever.

Gene editing will be used to alter DNA to erase the origins of a range of debilitating inherited disorders.

We should know how many defective children are being born because of the [nuclear] bomb tests.

Cancer is really a slew of rare diseases. Lung cancer has 700 sub-types, breast cancer has 30,000 mutations which means that every cancer in its own right is a rare disease. Sharing data globally in this context is really important from a life-threatening perspective.