There are now 24,000 under-18s on the DNA Database that have never been cautioned or convicted. Dispatches, Stealing Away Your Freedom, Channel 4 2008
Nothing to hide; nothing to fear: are you absolutely sure of that? ibid.
But she had competition. In Cambridge another team was also racing to make sense of DNA. Francis Crick, another former physicist, and James Watson, were building models. In April 1953 they published the famous double-helix. Crick and Watson got the glory. But their model was actually inspired by one of Franklin’s photographs, shown to Watson without Franklin’s knowledge. Michael Mosley, The Story of Science: Power, Proof & Passion, BBC 2010
A mother underwent a routine DNA test. The results seemingly beyond reason. She has two sets of DNA. Is it a mistake, or is it possible for the genetic information of two people to exist in the same body? In 2002 Lydia Fairchild, mother to four children fathered by her partner Jamie Townsend, applied for state benefits to help raise her young family ... Four DNA tests showed she was not the biological mother of the children she gave birth to. Why? ... None of the theories seemed plausible. Lydia’s case remained a mystery. But then Lydia’s attorney, Alan Tindell, discovered evidence in a medical journal of an incredible and almost unheard of genetic condition called Tetragametic Chimerism. Weird or What? Mind Control, Discovery 2011
She is one of only about forty people on the planet known to be a Chimera. ibid.
Bio-geneticist Dr Karry Mullis had won the Nobel Prize for inventing PCR, a revolutionary technique for multiplying tiny amounts of DNA for use in genetic research. A creative breakthrough he claims came from psychedelic drug use. Horizon: Psychedelic Science, BBC 1997
We are on the brink of uncovering a hidden world. A world that connects past and future generations in ways we never imagined possible ... The science of inheritance is being turned on its head. Horizon: The Ghost in Your Genes, BBC 2005
Marcus Pembrey is one of a select band of scientists. A band of scientists who are daring to challenge orthodoxy. They believe the lives of our parents, grandparents and even our great-grandparents can directly affect our well-being. Despite never experiencing any of these things ourselves. To many these ideas are regarded as scientific heresy. ibid.
Thirty thousand genes didn’t appear enough to explain human complexity. There had to be something they’d missed. The first hints of what was missing lay in the curious paradox of the Pradavillae and Angelman’s syndromes: two quite different diseases caused by exactly the same genetic fault. ibid.
Something other than just the DNA was capable of moving between the generations. It was a tantalising glimpse into this unknown and unexpected world. A hidden layer acting on and directly able to control how our genes function. ibid.
If they find the same stress effect in the children’s children on 9/11, then it will be clear that a general memory of a stressful event can travel through the generations. ibid.
Environmental information was being imprinted on the egg and the sperm at the time of their formation. ibid.
The work of these scientists is at last throwing a spotlight on to the mysterious hidden world of epigenetics. They appear to show that the lives of our ancestors have a capacity to affect us directly. ibid.
Picture a world where cancer is cured with a packet of pills. Where a single injection treats heart disease, Altzheimer’s or Diabetes. This was the future that was imagined ten years ago when it was announced that a draft of the Human Genome had been sequenced. Scientists had cracked our genetic code. And had mapped the billions of letters in our DNA. They hoped that this breakthrough would usher in a new age of medicine. Horizon: Miracle Cure? A Decade of the Human Genome, BBC 2010
Taken together this is our genome: it’s made of just four chemicals, or letters – 3.2 billion of them. Mistakes in the order of these letters can lead to illness. ibid.
Ten years ago scientists were surprised by how few genes they discovered in our DNA. But it quickly became clear that fewer did not mean less complicated. It was the activity level of genes and how they worked together that scientists had to understand. ibid.
Scientists have learnt from studies of identical twins and of adoption cases that around half of what makes people alcoholic is genetic, and around half is their environment. ibid.
Lungs are particularly resistant to gene therapy. These have a large surface area to be targeted, and have also evolved to keep out unknown particles. ibid.
After a decade of intensive research a new order of medicine is entering the final stage of trails. That of genetically targeted medicine. So-called personalised medicine. For cancer patients targeted drugs hold the promise of being more effective. ibid.
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, co-author 1977 paper
We’ve located the gene that makes myoglobin. Code of a Killer, lecture, ITV 2015
As unique as a fingerprint. And there it is in black and white for all to see. ibid.
Eu – bloody – reeka! ibid.
Like it or not, the science saved us. ibid.
Usual crazies. A couple of mediums. One of them is convinced the killer is a police officer which is why he’s getting away with it. Code of a Killer II, rozzer to investigator
You’ve got him. You’ve finally got him. ibid. Roberts to investigator
Colin Pitchfork received two life sentences for the murders of Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth. ibid.
Optical Genetic Expression means the best that the organism has within the DNA: is expressed because of favourable atmospheric conditions. Dr Carl Baugh, author
Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable. Kenneth R Miller
Genetics as a whole is the great over-hyped science, and geneticists know that even if they don’t say it. All that genetics really is is anatomy plus an enormous research group grant. It’s what anatomists did in the fifteenth century-looking at the heart and seeing how it worked. Now, we are doing the same with DNA. Steve Jones, cited Sean O’Hagan, Observer 14th September 2002, ‘End of sperm report’
Jerusalem 1963: Tudor Parfitt is just a nineteen year old student ... What hooked Parfitt was an extraordinary idea – after thousands of years in exile, wave after wave of Jews were returning to the Holy Land ... ‘I was imbued with ideas of the lost tribes’. Secrets of the Bible s1e5: Tudor Parfitt and the Lost Tribes of Israel ***** Yesterday 2015
Parfitt is invited to Johannesburg ... The Lemba: the claim to be a lost tribe of Israel. ibid.
DNA tests are done on the Lemba ... ‘Much more like those found in Semitic populations ... from the Middle East.’ ibid. Dr Karl Skorecki
Can he trace their DNA? ... Are the Lemba actually Jewish? ... More than half of Lemba men share the exact same Cohen DNA markers – there can be no doubt ... The Lemba are from a long lost time of priestly Jews. ibid.
Ark of the Covenant ... ‘They had brought an object from the Middle East which did all of the things that the Ark of the Covenant did, that was carried on poles ... which had sacred things inside it.’ ibid.
A drum ... Many scholars now believe that there was more than one Ark ... More portable, replaceable Arks that were taken on journeys or into battle. ibid.
Crick and a colleague made what they called a highly unorthodox proposal: perhaps DNA originated not from Earth but from another alien world. The theory was a new version of an idea that goes back to ancient Greece. Codes and Conspiracies: Ancient Aliens, Discovery 2015
Every complete set of chromosomes contains the full code; so there are, as a rule, two copies of the latter in the fertilized egg cell, which forms the earliest stage of the future individual. In calling the structure of the chromosome fibres a code-script we mean that the all-penetrating mind, once conceived by Laplace, to which every causal connection lay immediately open, could tell from their structure whether the egg would develop, under suitable conditions, into a black cock or into a speckled hen, into a fly or a maize plant, a rhododendron, a beetle, a mouse or a woman. To which we may add, that the appearances of the egg cells are very often remarkably similar; and even when they are not, as in the case of the comparatively gigantic eggs of birds and reptiles, the difference is not so much in the relevant structures as in the nutritive material which in these cases is added for obvious reasons.
But the term code-script is, of course, too narrow. The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are law-code and executive power, or to use another simile, they are architects plan and builder’s craft-in one. Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?
And does this same DNA match the blood you found on the backgate of Bundy? And does it match the blood you found inside Mr Simpson’s Broncho? And does it match the DNA and the blood you found leading up to Mr Simpson’s house, and on the sock at the foot of his bed? The People vs O J Simpson: American Crime Story VIII, Marsha to expert, FX 2016