Morteza Karami

“But in the years that followed, science journalists the world over began expressing their disappointment in the contribution that knowledge of our complete DNA sequence had made to medicine. Although decoding our own instruction book is an irrefutable achievement that has made a difference to treatments for several important illnesses, it has not revealed as much as we expected about the causes of many common diseases. Searching for genetic differences in common to people with a particular disease did not throw up straightforward links for as many conditions as had been expected. Often, conditions were weakly linked to tens or hundreds of gene variants, but rarely was it the case that possessing a given gene variant would lead directly to a given disease.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“If your microbes are working on your behalf to extract energy from your food, it is your particular community of microbes that determines how many calories you get from what you eat, not a standard conversion table.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“The finger-like projections grow longer at the insistence of microbes, making the surface area large enough to capture the energy it needs from food. It’s been estimated that rats would need about 30 per cent more to eat if it weren’t for their microbes.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they?”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood