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January 31, 2018 - February 10, 2019
our capacity to understand and manipulate human genomes alters our conception of what it means to be “human.”
His instinctive genius lay in unearthing patterns—systems of organization—that lay behind the specimens; not in Kingdoms and Orders, but in kingdoms of order that ran through the biological world.
Monster by monster, evolution advanced.
Being rediscovered once is proof of a scientist’s prescience. Being re-discovered thrice is an insult.
Herbert Spencer—the philosopher who had coined the phrase survival of the fittest—had spent much of his life bedridden with various illnesses, struggling with his own fitness for survival.
The mutants, again, would prove crucial to these experiments: only the outliers could illuminate the nature of normal heredity.
There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirsty matching of an organism to its environment.
The physical structure of the molecule enables its chemical nature, the chemical nature enables its physiological function, and its physiology ultimately permits its biological activity. The complex workings of living beings can be perceived in terms of these layers: physics enabling chemistry, and chemistry enabling physiology.
Genesis was gene-sis.
That humans and worms have about the same number of genes—around twenty thousand—and yet the fact that only one of these two organisms is capable of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel suggests that the number of genes is largely unimportant to the physiological complexity of the organism. “It is not what you have,” as a certain Brazilian samba instructor once told me, “it is what you do with it.”
Human physiology, by analogy, is the developmental consequence of certain genes intersecting with other genes in the right sequence, in the right space. A gene is one line in a recipe that specifies an organism. The human genome is the recipe that specifies a human.
We had graduated, in short, from thinking about genes, to thinking in genes.
is more illuminating to write the history of technology through transitions: linear motion to circular motion; visual space to subvisual space; motion on land to motion in air; physical connectivity to virtual connectivity.
they had acquired a concomitant loss of cruelty and malice
And when it’s done, someone else will sit down and say, ‘It’s time to begin.’ ”
much of the human genome is not particularly human.
The intergenerational time between any two family members is proportional to the extent of genetic diversity between them.
making the mitochondrial genome an ideal genetic timekeeper.
academic disputes are often the most vicious because the stakes are so overwhelmingly low. By
Given our rather brief tenure on earth as a species, we are much more alike than unlike each other.
vast proportion of genetic diversity (85 to 90 percent) occurs within so-called races (i.e., within Asians or Africans) and only a minor proportion (7 percent) between racial groups
Intelligence, in short, is heritable (i.e., influenced by genes), but not easily inheritable (i.e., moved down intact from one generation to the next).
Male readers of that last paragraph should take notice: we barely made it.
If we did not think of variations in height or the development of dyslexia or type 1 diabetes as choices, then we could not think of sexual identity as a choice.
There is a fundamental symmetry to the idea that the mechanism by which genes cause disease is precisely analogous to the mechanism by which genes cause normal behavior and development.
That being happens through . . . be-ing? I find that formulation illuminatingly beautiful.
An upright organism with opposable thumbs is thus built from a script, but built to go off script.
The genome contains the memory to build every cell in every tissue in every organism—memory so overwhelmingly profuse and diverse that a cell devoid of a system of selective repression and reactivation would become overwhelmed by it.
the capacity to
use any memory functionally depends, paradoxically, on the abilit...
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Our deepest scientific laws, in contrast, are often named after the limits of human knowledge: uncertainty, relativity, incompleteness, impossibility.
When the technology to manipulate this law is mastered, we will move through one of the most profound transitions in our history. We will learn to read and write our selves, ourselves.
When you decide to test for ‘future risk,’ you are also, inevitably, asking yourself, what kind of future am I willing to risk?”
It took the full force of human genetics to bring sanity to the study of madness.
To fail to acknowledge the depth of Erika’s anguish is to reveal a flaw in our empathy. But to refuse to acknowledge the price to be paid in this trade-off is to reveal, conversely, a flaw in our humanity.
The doctors pushing the frontiers of human medicine had forgotten to account for the common cold.
Normalcy is the antithesis of evolution.
Chance would become mitigated, but so, inevitably, would choice.3
