#genetic

I placed some of the DNA on the ends of my fingers and rubbed them together. The stuff was sticky. It began to dissolve on my skin. 'It's melting -- like cotton candy.' 'Sure. That's the sugar in the DNA,' Smith said. 'Would it taste sweet?' 'No. DNA is an acid, and it's got salts in it. Actually, I've never tasted it.' Later, I got some dried calf DNA. I placed a bit of the fluff on my tongue. It melted into a gluey ooze that stuck to the roof of my mouth in a blob. The blob felt slippery on my tongue, and the taste of pure DNA appeared. It had a soft taste, unsweet, rather bland, with a touch of acid and a hint of salt. Perhaps like the earth's primordial sea. It faded away. Page 67, in Richard Preston's biographical essay on Craig Venter, "The Genome Warrior" (originally published in The New Yorker in 2000). ↗

— Timothy Ferris

#freaky #genetics #science #science

You're not supposed to interject feelings into science, but part of the reason it's so fascinating that we're 8 percent (or more) fossilized virus is that it's so creepy that we're 8 percent (or more) fossilized virus. ↗

— Sam Kean

#science #love

I set up a laboratory in the Department of Physiology in the Medical School in South Africa and begin to try to find a bacteriophage system which we might use to solve the genetic code. ↗

— Sydney Brenner

#begin #code #department #find #genetic

If people lived to be a thousand years old, there’d be extreme inequality, based not on class like now, but on genetics. Think how far behind unmotivated and lazy people lag now after only 65 years on earth, and then multiply that by 15.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#class #classism #earth #genetics #inequality

I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it. ↗

— David Brooks

#information #knowledge #river #education

Cono felt embarrassed by the thought that he might have been just another pitiful orphan trying to turn his friends into family, and that he might be blinded by this need, a need that colored his whole life, that ache to offer worth to someone. ↗

— Victor Robert Lee

#espionage #genetics #kazakhstan #spy-thriller #family

A four-letter alphabet called DNA. ↗

— Matt Ridley

#genetics #heredity #nature

Newborn screening is a public health intervention that involves a simple blood test used to identify many life-threatening genetic illnesses before any symptoms begin. ↗

— Lucille Roybal-Allard

#before #begin #blood #genetic #health

Alcoholism is a genetically predisposed disease and it does run in my family. I also think I felt like a misfit. I was in the South, everybody was blonde. I just didn't feel like I fitted in. It was sort of my way of fitting. ↗

— Kristin Davis

#also #blonde #disease #does #everybody

Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people. ↗

— Freeman Dyson

#become #business #dedicated #devote #engineering