Inheritance Quotes

“As we’re about to see, by striving for even greater genetic perfection we might be eliminating a lot more than just millions of people who don’t fit the societal norms we’ve created. We might actually be eradicating the very solutions to the medical problems we’re working so hard to solve.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“But what if our experiences of being bullied did a lot more than just saddle us with some serious psychological baggage? Well, to answer that question, a group of researchers from the UK and Canada decided to study sets of monozygotic “identical” twins from the age of five. Besides having identical DNA, each twin pair in the study, up until that point, had never been bullied. You’ll be glad to know that these researchers were not allowed to traumatize their subjects, unlike how the Swiss mice were handled. Instead, they let other children do their scientific dirty work. After patiently waiting for a few years, the scientists revisited the twins where only one of the pair had been bullied. When they dropped back into their lives, they found the following: present now, at the age of 12, was a striking epigenetic difference that was not there when the children were five years old. The researchers found significant changes only in the twin who was bullied. This means, in no uncertain genetic terms, that bullying isn’t just risky in terms of self-harming tendencies for youth and adolescents; it actually changes how our genes work and how they shape our lives, and likely what we pass along to future generations.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“You may be surprised to learn that it’s been estimated to cost up to $635 billion a year in the United States alone,8 a figure greater than the costs associated with conditions like heart disease and cancer.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“In most circumstances when we spend a lengthy amount of time at higher elevations our genes begin to subtly adjust their expression, which prompts cells in our kidneys to make and secrete more erythropoietin, or EPO for short. This hormone stimulates cells in our bone marrow to increase the production of red blood cells, as well as keep the ones already in circulation around past their typical expiration date.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“One example of the Prevention Paradox occurs in the first weeks when people with high LDL or “bad” cholesterol start taking fish oil supplements. Researchers found that using fish oil (which is high in omega-3 fatty acids from mackerel, herring, tuna, halibut, salmon, cod liver, and even whale blubber) is associated with a wide range of changes in LDL levels across the population, from down by 50 percent to up by a whopping increase of 87 percent.6 Researchers have dug deeper to demonstrate that people who supplemented their diets with the so-called healthy fats found in fish oil actually had a greater negative change in their cholesterol levels if they were carriers of a gene variant called APOE4. Meaning that supplementing with fish oil may be good for some and very bad for other people’s cholesterol levels depending on which genes they’ve inherited.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“From aardvarks to zebras, most of our mammalian cousins have working copies of the genes that can manufacture vitamin C naturally within their bodies. But humans (along with guinea pigs, of all things) have a genetic inborn error in metabolism, a mutation that renders us incapable of doing the same thing. This makes us completely dependent upon our diets to get our daily supply of vitamin C.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“Over a 10-year period following the introduction of the campaign, the rate of SIDS death fell by half. As with any medical innovation, with that success came a rather unforeseen but thankfully somewhat benign complication. Babies who sleep on their backs, while the boney plates that form the back of their skulls are still forming and fusing, become more likely to have slightly misshapen heads. And babies with misshapen heads became far from exceptional: During the years in which back sleeping became the norm, the incidence of such affects quintupled.11”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“For years now we’ve begun to notice detrimental changes in the curvatures of the spines of elementary-age schoolkids, who have been paying the price for overloaded backpacks.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“Genetic researchers decided to follow a group of 200 Spanish teens who were on a 10-week quest to battle the bulge. What geneticists discovered was that they could actually reverse engineer the campers’ summer experience and predict which of the teens would lose the most weight depending on the pattern of methylation—the way their genes were turned off or on—in around five sites in their genome before summer camp even began.7 Some kids were epigenetically primed to lose the bulge at summer camp while others were going to keep it on, despite diligent adherence to their counselors’ dietary protocol.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“Initially, Mendel’s work on the mating habits of mice seemed simple enough. But eventually, to Schaffgotsch, it simply went too far.3 For starters, the caged rodents in Mendel’s spacious, stone-floored quarters gave off a stench that Schaffgotsch found incompatible with the tidy life expected of a monk of the Augustinian order. Then there was the sex. Mendel, who like all of the monks at St. Thomas had taken a vow of consecrated chastity, seemed obsessively interested in how the furry little creatures were getting it on. That, Schaffgotsch figured, was beyond the pale. So the dour bishop ordered the inquisitive young monk to shut down his little mouse brothel. If Mendel were, as he professed, purely interested in how traits move from one generation of living creatures to the next, he’d have to be content with something less titillating. Something like peas.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives, and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“Methylation works by the use of a chemical compound, in the shape of three-leaf clovers made up of hydrogen and carbon,”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“microbiomes,”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes