Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating.
We found out that, contrary to what many people thought, in the immune system, genes can change during the life cycle of the individual.
Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one’s own genes in the generations to follow.
The reason why people are huge stars is nothing to do with acting. It’s the magic. Charisma is a word that’s used too often; it’s something special, and it’s what makes stars. It’s luck, and basically, it’s genes.
I am aware that I look good for my age. It’s my genes. My dad looked incredibly young, so did my mother. And a younger husband helps. Scott is only 45. If he hadn’t come along, I don’t know what I’d have done.
If you know the mother’s genome and the father’s genome, and you see that the children have some genes that neither parent has, then you know that difference is either a mutation or a processing error.
In the past, geneticists have looked at so-called disease genes, but a lot of people have changes in their genes and don’t get these diseases. There have to be other parts of physiology and genetics that compensate.
I was always thin. I guess I have good genes, so I never worried too much about my weight.
I’m lucky to have good genes, and life’s all about balance.
Thankfully I have good genes and a fast metabolism, which doesn’t make me put on weight easily.
God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal – there’s no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.
The interaction of the variation in our genes is what’s responsible for lots of our attributes and vigor.
I’m lucky. I’ve got pretty good genes.
Good Viking genes, being vegetarian and having rowdy dogs and kids definitely keep me in shape. Not eating meat gives me the energy I need to keep up with work, family and travel – I’m very active.
I was blessed with good looks and I have good genes.
You could double the number of synaptic connections in a very simple neurocircuit as a result of experience and learning. The reason for that was that long-term memory alters the expression of genes in nerve cells, which is the cause of the growth of new synaptic connections.
Genes can’t possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.
We all grow up with inherited genes and inherited sensibilities, and they run very, very deep.
Perhaps genes did regulate the aging process. Perhaps different organisms had different life spans because a universal regulatory ‘clock’ was set to run at different speeds in different species.
It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.
We can’t understand when we’re pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time – like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.
And of course, identifying all human genes and proteins will have great medical significance.
I look better with a tan, but I’ve never gone the fake route. I don’t need to – I have good foreign genes: half Spanish, half Hungarian.
I must have good genes from my parents because I feel no slowdown of energy, enthusiasm or even memory.
The grand saga of how humans spread across the globe will need some amendments and annotations – rendezvous here, elopements there, and the commingling of genes most everywhere.
There’s nothing wrong with pitch counts. But not when it’s spit out by a computer, and the computer does not look at an individual’s mechanics. And you can’t look at his genes. It should come from the individual and the pitching coach and the manager.
Few men in their 70s looked as good as my father did. What was his secret? Genes, maybe, since he didn’t exercise or diet, and he kept a candy drawer, drank a pot of black coffee every day, and read in the middle of the night. Still, he took such joy in being a dad – and in life in general – and his happiness showed.
Genes don’t mean necessarily that you have got a certain strand of gene that makes you particularly acceptable as a public official.
So no, it’s not all in the genes, but what isn’t in the genes isn’t in the family environment either. It can’t be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.
The first generation of biotech physically cut and pasted from one organism to another. You learned that taxol helped cure cancer, then you found the source organism and extracted the genes to make your drug. Now physical science is becoming information science.
I have good genes. My father is Danish and my mother is Irish and Native American. They both have good skin.
When you meet kin, there is an energy and sparkle between your bodies. It must be chemical somehow – DNA and genes.
New molecular methods that add or modify genes can protect plants from diseases and pests and improve crops in ways that are both more environmentally benign and beyond the capability of older methods.
Genes themselves are made of bits.
Mutations can arise anywhere in the genome, in gene DNA and noncoding DNA alike. But mutations to genes have bigger consequences: They can disable proteins and kill a creature.
My genes are such that I’ve always been relatively in shape.
We are fashioned not by our genes, but by our environment – by the family and socio-historic conditions in which we evolve.
The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.
Every animal would rather die themselves than lose their offspring. But it’s just genes, isn’t it? All of our existence is spent worrying about the next generation, but we don’t actually seem to get anywhere.
If you take 100 breast-cancer samples, 100 types of cancer have 100 different hallmarks of mutated genes. You could be nihilistic and say, ‘Oh, God, we’ll never be able to tackle this!’ But there are deep, systematic, organizational principles at work in all that diversity.
I want to hear from the creature who isn’t blessed with unbelievable good looks and incredible genes. I want to hear from the geek girl, the forgotten girl, the invisible girl and the miserable girl.
The more that I looked at DNA, the more I realized it was nature and nurture. It’s how genes and your environment work together to produce the person you are.
I think I was dealt a good hand. I have happy genes.
Border collies were trained in Scotland. They have the Scots’ commands in their genes. At the dog trials, the owners wear those three-piece western suits, cowboy boots and 10-gallon hats, but they carry Scots shepherd’s crooks over their arms and talk to their dogs in Scots accents.
On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.
Music is in my genes. My entire family is into singing.
Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill.
Honestly, I’m blessed with good genes and a good sense of discipline – I eat whatever I want, but I eat very controlled portions and stop when I’m full.
Once the principle is there, that cells have the same genes, my own personal belief is that we will, in the end, understand everything about how cells actually work.
We have 26,000 genes. But a blind, millimetre-long roundworm with only 959 cells in total already has over 19,000.
We know that genes shape human cultures and human societies: The DNA we inherited from our ancestors makes certain foods taste better, affects the way we care for children, influences what colors we find vibrant, and contributes to our love of socializing, among other examples.
I’ve been lucky: my Japanese genes – from my mother’s side – and a lifelong moisturising routine have helped keep me looking good.
No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves.
In any complex organism, brain formation and function must be controlled in part by genes.
I like having a good time. It’s probably my mother’s Brazilian genes in me – party, party.
We know specific genes are turned on in specific cells, but we don’t know to what extent this happens.
I would like to be known as one of the best actors in the world because that is something that I would have earned. And being sexiest would come from my genes… it is something I was born with and not earned it for myself.
Both of my grandmothers are aging well, and my mom is, too. I’ve got some good genes.
I have Scottish genes: my grandfather was Scottish. My father was a voracious drinker. So, drinking came naturally to me.
