Genetic Testing Quotes

Do you know there is actually a blood test out there now to find out if your kid is gay or not? Yeah, it's an HIV test.

When I was 16, my dad took me to a DNA conference at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, California, and I was captivated by this way of looking at biology and by the discussions of bits of nucleic acid that could make us sick.

I was born with this. It's a hereditary genetic condition. This is something you can go your whole life without really knowing that something's wrong. I had high blood pressure, and that was the first sign.

Reich Committee for the Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses

My father himself was a human geneticist who was recognized for demonstrating that older mothers tend to get more Down syndrome children, but he had lots of scientific interests.

In my case, symptoms began to appear when I was only 57. In fact, the doctors believe early-onset Alzheimer's has a strong genetic predictor, and that it may have been progressing for some years before I was diagnosed.

Man scans with scrupulous care the pedigree of his horses, cattle and dogs before he mates them; but when it comes to his marriage, he rarely, or never, takes such care.

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

I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.

If I can get people to accept that a DNA test is nothing to be intimidated about, then we can do tests that determine how well you metabolise certain drugs and test for breast cancer.

Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic terms. When we read about the latest discovery of a link between a gene and a disease, we imagine that we've learned the cause of the disease, and we may even think we'll get a cure by fixing the gene.

Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring

I'm a big believer in what's called personalized medicine, which refers to customizing your health care to your specific needs based on your physiology, genetics, value system and unique conditions.

My sister learned she was a carrier for a recessive disease, Bloom syndrome, late in one of her pregnancies. I remember the panicked call and the weeks of worry as she and her husband awaited his test results; if he was also a carrier, this meant their daughter had a one in four chance of being born with the disorder.

Of course, I could try IVF. But having watched my friend TV presenter Clare Nasir go through it, I know how tough the journey is. Emotional fool I may be, but even I can see that's too selfish a course of action to impose on my family.

We lost a baby at 11 weeks when I was 34, and we got married expecting we would have no trouble having another child, because I'd fallen pregnant that one time. But it just didn't happen and we did about four years of IVF, trying very hard to have a baby.

Genes work with probabilities; they don't work with certainties. So most things that you're looking at with these genetic tests, it's not like you're condemned to automatically get the disease or the syndrome. There's a lot of factors in play there.

Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.

I've started the John Ritter Foundation for Aortic Health. The big focus is helping people get the correct diagnoses.

Mum and Dad died of heart problems, my grandparents died of it, my sister has had mini strokes, my brother has had a heart attack - it's genetic; there's nothing I can do.

The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.

I met with my lawyers. They gave me all the wrong advice. For a long time I refused to accept the child was mine. I should have met her, arranged a DNA test and accepted my responsibility.

The fact that I have a risk genetically for Alzheimer's and blindness is not great news. But the reality is that any one of us will have dozens of these risks, and what we have to learn is how to deal with them.

Although not yet routine, many cancer centers have the technology to sequence some or all of a patient's cancer genome. This can provide massive amounts of valuable information about your cancer, including whether you have genetic mutations and other abnormalities for which new drugs are available.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.