Hacking the Code of Life Quotes

“About 70% of the licences that Stanford grants generate little or no income. It’s basically very difficult to predict the winners in the new technology sweepstake.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“dragons and other parthenogenetic organisms are able to reproduce without any input from sperm.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“Once they are inside an egg, two sperm nuclei or two egg nuclei can get together just as effectively as an egg and sperm.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“lots of other animals, from stick insects to Komodo dragons, have no such absolute barrier. Their females don’t have much trouble producing young without a daddy. So what’s so special about mammals?”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“mitochondrial DNA is inherited only through the maternal line.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“These are essentially the power generation units of our cells, and we inherit mitochondrial DNA only from our mothers.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“About 99% of the DNA in a human cell is in the nucleus. Half of this is inherited from your mother and half from your father. But about 1% of the human genome is in 1,000 to 2,000 tiny subcellular structures called mitochondria.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“And when you realise that men produce about 1,500 sperm every second,2 the potential for changes to creep in to the genome is obvious.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“For about 60 years type 1 diabetics were treated with insulin extracted from the pancreas of pigs. This wasn’t ideal as the insulin was a relatively minor component of all the proteins in the pig pancreas and required a lot of expensive purification to produce a relatively small amount of the drug. The pig insulin wasn’t quite identical to the normal human version and it wasn’t suitable for some patients. It was also very difficult to ramp up supply quickly when demand increased. In the 1980s, the drug firm Eli Lilly produced and sold human insulin that had been created in genetically modified bacteria. Now, virtually all insulin is made in bacteria or yeast.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“The Belgian Blue and Piedmont strains of cattle arose naturally through random mutation of this gene. The same is true of Texel sheep. It’s these ‘natural’ mutations that are commonly reintroduced by gene editing. Two lamb chops, each with the same characteristics.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“Essentially, this means that the Food and Drug Administration wants control over animals that have simply inherited genetic changes through perfectly natural breeding.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“These are the founder stock of pedigree herds and are far too valuable to turn into meat.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“If the change introduced by gene editing is one that could have arisen through traditional breeding practices, there should be no need for regulation.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“Every year about a billion pigs are slaughtered in our seemingly unending appetite for pork and bacon. About half of these are in China so it’s perhaps no surprise that a research facility in China focused its gene editing efforts on this species.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“The rationale was quite simple. If the gene editing resulted in a genetic change that does or could occur in nature, then there’s no need for the regulators to get involved.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“In this manifestation of gene editing, it is impossible to distinguish between an organism that was edited by scientists in the laboratory and a naturally occurring variant with the same change in the same letter.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“gene editing leaves no molecular trace at all.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“The phrase ‘gene editing’ is used to refer to the technology that has developed since 2012, which permits scientists to alter genomes with exceptional precision and ease.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“In 2016, over 100 Nobel laureates – about one third of all living Nobel medal holders – wrote an open letter to Greenpeace criticising their position on genetically modified organisms and on Golden Rice in particular.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“creating crops which are robust, better able to cope with environmental stresses and deliver increased yields with no increase in expensive inputs.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“Increasing the yield from crops, ideally without having to use additional expensive inputs, is a key target for agricultural companies and farmers, both commercial and subsistence”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“For slow-maturing plants like citrus fruits, which also have low fertility, it can take a lifetime to determine if the new offspring have the desired characteristics and will breed true. With modern gene editing techniques, this could be speeded up to less than the time it takes to complete a PhD project.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“Globally about a third of all food produced for humans is wasted.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“A typical American has 40 times the carbon footprint of someone from Bangladesh, for example.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“We are a pest species, destroying our environments and wiping out vast numbers of other organisms with whom we share this delicate globe.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“book of life has increased exponentially since Charpentier and Doudna broke gene editing out of bacteria and into the wider world in 2012.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“This relies on the second component which is a protein that can act like a pair of molecular scissors, cutting across the DNA double helix. These scissors don’t cut randomly; they don’t just flail across the genome. Instead, they only cut where the guide molecule has inserted itself into the DNA.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“Let’s imagine DNA as a giant zip, where each tooth is one of the four letters of the genetic code.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“Charpentier and Doudna had liberated this technology. It was no longer restricted to the world of bacteria. The two women were highly attuned to the implications of their findings, speculating in the Abstract of their paper that their finding ‘highlights the potential to exploit the system for … programmable genome editing’. But to be truly useful, the system would need to work inside cells. Just seven months later, a paper from the lab of Feng Zhang was published in the same journal, which demonstrated that this new approach did indeed work in cells, including human ones.11 The ability to hack the code of life had truly arrived.”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

“The blockbuster paper was published online in Science on 28 June 2012.10 It was a combined effort from the labs of Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna,”
― Nessa Carey, Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures