Technology touches all of our lives and changes them in ways that are hard to predict. ibid. Hawking
ECM or Extra-Cellular Matrix: it’s a biological structure on which a body can build or rebuild itself and its found in all animals. Brave New World with Stephen Hawking V: Biology, Mark Evans in Panama, Joy Ridenberg in Pittsburgh
The more we discover about DNA the more complex it becomes. ibid. Hawking
There’s some new evidence that what we do to our genes can affect not only our children but our children’s children. ibid. Professor Robert Winston
Epigenetics and the study of the way genes function will be one of the most significant advances in health care in the next decade. ibid.
We may be the last generation shaped only by accident at birth, crafted only by nature. James Burke, Connections s2e1: Revolutions, BBC 1994
It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid – usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their generic material. Francis Crick
It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. Francis Crick & James D Watson, proposing the double helix
Some day a child is going to sue its parents for being born. They will say, my life is so awful with these terrible genetic defects and you just callously didn't find out. James D Watson
It’s a giant resource that will change mankind, like the printing press. James D Watson
During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project. Sydney Brenner
DNA: a master molecule of life on Earth. It’s made of four molecular parts called nucleotides, which constitute the four letters of the genetic code, the language of heredity. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue, PBS 1980
Human DNA is a coiled ladder, a billion nucleotides long. 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
This book is about whether God genes exist, not about whether there is a God. Gene Hamer
Religious believers can point to the existence of God genes as one more sign of the creator’s ingenuity – a clever way to help humans acknowledge and embrace a divine presence. Gene Hamer
In 2004 geneticist Dean Hamer claimed to have identified what he has called the God gene also known as Vmat2. Professor Robert Winston, The Story of God
Man is a competitive creature, and the seeds of conflict are built deep into our genes. We fought each other on the savannah and only survived against great odds by organising ourselves into groups which would have had a common purpose, giving morale and fortitude. Robert Winston
Genes are not like engineering blueprints; they are more like recipes in a cookbook. They tell us what ingredients to use, in what quantities, and in what order – but they do not provide a complete, accurate plan of the final result. Ian Stewart, Life’s Other Secret 1998 preface
The idea of a God gene goes against all my personal theological convictions. You can’t cut faith down to the lowest common denominator of genetic survival. It shows the poverty of deductionist thinking. John Polkinghorne, Daily Telegraph
Genetics is about how information is stored and transmitted between generations. John M Smith
We share half our genes with the banana. Robert May
Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. F William Engdahl
Is he a dread genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical as werewolves. By increasing the information we have about the various causes of the constraints that limit our current opportunities, he has increased our powers to avoid what we want to avoid, prevent what we want to prevent. Knowledge of the roles of our genes, and the genes of the other species around us, is not the enemy of human freedom, but one of its best friends. Daniel C Dennett, Freedom Evolves
My selfish genes can go jump in the lake. Stephen Pinker
Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behaviour directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life. Steven Pinker
In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees. Michio Kaku
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, 'End of sperm report' The Observer 14 September 2002
Genetics has enticed a great many explorers during the past two decades. They have labored with fruit-flies and guinea-pigs, with sweet peas and corn, with thousands of animals and plants in fact, and they have made heredity no longer a mystery but an exact science to be ranked close behind physics and chemistry in definiteness of conception. One is inclined to believe, however, that the unique magnetic attraction of genetics lies in the vision of potential good which it holds for mankind rather than a circumscribed interest in the hereditary mechanisms of the lowly species used as laboratory material. If man had been found to be sharply demarcated from the rest of the occupants of the world, so that his heritage of physical form, of physiological function, and of mental attributes came about in a superior manner setting him apart as lord of creation, interest in the genetics of the humbler organisms – if one admits the truth – would have flagged severely. Biologists would have turned their attention largely to the ways of human heredity, in spite of the fact that the difficulties encountered would have rendered progress slow and uncertain. Since this was not the case, since the laws ruling the inheritance of the denizens of the garden and the inmates of the stable were found to be applicable to prince and potentate as well, one could shut himself up in his laboratory and labor to his heart’s content, feeling certain that any truth which it fell to his lot to discover had a real human interest, after all. Edward Murray East, Mankind at the Crossroads v-vi 1923
Genetics is the first biological science which got in the position in which physics has been in for many years. One can justifiably speak about such a thing as theoretical mathematical genetics, and experimental genetics, just as in physics. There are some mathematical geniuses who work out what to an ordinary person seems a fantastic kind of theory. This fantastic kind of theory nevertheless leads to experimentally verifiable prediction, which an experimental physicist then has to test the validity of. Since the times of Wright, Haldane, and Fisher, evolutionary genetics has been in a similar position. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Oral history memoir. Columbia University 1962 cited William B Provine & Sewall Wright
In a sense, genetics grew up as an orphan. In the beginning botanists and zoologists were often indifferent and sometimes hostile toward it. ‘Genetics deals only with superficial characters,’ it was often said. Biochemists likewise paid it little heed in its early days. They, especially medical biochemists, knew of Garrod’s inborn errors of metabolism and no doubt appreciated them in the biochemical sense and as diseases; but the biological world was inadequately prepared to appreciate fully the significance of his investigations and his thinking. Geneticists, it should be said, tended to be preoccupied mainly with the mechanisms by which genetic material is transmitted from one generation to, the next. George Beadle, Genes and Chemical Reactions, Nobel Lecture 11 December 1958
Molecular genetics, our latest wonder, has taught us to spell out the connectivity of the tree of life in such palpable detail that we may say in plain words, This riddle of life has been solved. Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück, Nobel lecture 10 Dec 1969