Human Genome Project Quotes & Sayings

You can never judge a paint hue by the liquid color in the paint pot. You must apply it to a wall, wait for the paint to dry, then decide. — Dorothy Draper

Before the Human Genome Project, most scientists assumed, based on our complex brains and behaviors, that humans must have around 100,000 genes; some estimates went as high as 150,000. — Sam Kean

Recently, results of the Human Genome Project have shattered one of Science's fundamental core beliefs, the concept of genetic determinism. We have been led to believe that our genes determine the character of our lives, yet new research surprisingly reveals that it is the character of our lives that controls our genes. Rather than being victims of our heredity, we are actually masters of our genome. — Bruce H. Lipton

Sometimes it is claimed by those who argue that race is just a social construct that the human genome project shows that because people share roughly 99% of their genes in common, that there are no races. This is silly. — J. Philippe Rushton

The overall view of the human genome project has been one of great excitement and positive press, but there are people who have concerns that are quite reasonable, and they are frightened of things they don't understand. — Thomas R. Cech

Your one certainty in life, your power as a human being, is that you have a choice in every situation about what you do next and about how you take what has happened to you. — Ben Whishaw

Every time I'm with you, I only want you more. — Linda Kage

During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project. — Sydney Brenner

Even if we never cure a single disease, the Human Genome Project and other ventures will have been worth it. — Sam Kean

I don't know why we keep building these fucking dams," Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. "Not only do they cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, where they've all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They're going to build another eighty of them. It's just balmy. We must have beaver genes or something ... There's just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out. — Douglas Adams

In the late 1970s, when I was a professor at Caltech, I pioneered four instruments for analyzing genes and proteins that revolutionized modern biology - and one of these, the automated DNA sequencer, enabled the Human Genome Project. — Leroy Hood

This is not the place! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple days of hopelessness. Future scientists will call it the Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case history of chasing rainbows. — Chuck Palahniuk

Once a genetic component has been established, the search for the genes involved can begin. This is a time-consuming and complex process that has recently been greatly facilitated by the information obtained by the Human Genome Project.51 — Joseph E. Ledoux

As was predicted at the beginning of the Human Genome Project, getting the sequence will be the easy part as only technical issues are involved. The hard part will be finding out what it means, because this poses intellectual problems of how to understand the participation of the genes in the functions of living cells. — Sydney Brenner

Solidarity with local communities lies at the heart of culture-centered public relations because it seeks to co-create local narratives that have otherwise been erased from the mainstream public spheres (de Sousa Santos, Nunes, and Meneses, 2008). Local voices offer entry points for co-creating narratives that have otherwise been erased. It is through the re-appropriation of the community as a site of resistance as opposed to a site of neoliberal governance that new meaning structures are articulated (Beverly, 2004a,b; Spivak, 1988a,b; Tihuwai Smith, 2006). It is through these new meanings narrated at local community levels that the scientific modernist discourses of neoliberalism are disrupted. For instance, to the large-scale funding of the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) with the goal of mapping — Krishnamurthy Sriramesh

Poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last
what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn
whatever they had been, they were men! — H.P. Lovecraft

Actually, I was the very lowest ranked member of the crew. I would only be "in command" if I were the only remaining person."
What do you know? I'm in command — Andy Weir

The Human Genome Project has given us a genetic parts list. — Leroy Hood

One of the good things about the public Human Genome Project is that the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health spent a part of their budget on the ethical, legal, and social implications of their research. — Juan Enriquez

Place. Less than 1 percent of the area is managed for wildlife habitat protection. Where early travelers saw sharp-tailed grouse, bison, bighorn sheep, grizzly bears, numerous beaver and even wolverines, today they see dust, feral horses, and noxious weeds including cheatgrass, halogeton and Russian thistle. — Annie Proulx

Some software is actually pretty good, by any standard. Think of the Mars Rovers, Google, and the Human Genome Project. Now, that's quality software! — Bjarne Stroustrup

To the extent that genomes can be thought of as compressed encodings of biological structures, they are spectacularly efficient. All the trillions of cells in the human body-not just the tens of billions in the brain-are guided in one way or another by the information contained in 30,000 or so genes. The best high-quality set of pictures of the body- the National Institutes of Health Visible Human Project, a series of high-resolution digital photos of slices taken from volunteer Joseph Paul Jernigan (deceased)-takes up about 60 gigabytes, enough (if left uncompressed) to fill about 100 CD-ROMs-and still not enough detail to capture individual cells. The genome, in contrast, contains only about 3 billion nucleotides, the equivalent (at two bits per nucleotide) of less than two-thirds of a gigabyte, or a single CD-ROM. — Gary F. Marcus

Geneticists experienced a comparable shock when, contrary to their expectations of over 120,000 genes, they found that the entire human genome consists of approximately 25,000 genes. (Pennisi 2003a and 2003b; Pearson 2003; Goodman 2003) More than eighty percent of the presumed and required DNA does not exist! The missing genes are proving to be more troublesome than the missing eighteen minutes of the Nixon tapes. The one-gene, one-protein concept was a fundamental tenet of genetic determinism. Now that the Human Genome Project has toppled the one-gene for one-protein concept, our current theories of how life works have to be scrapped. No longer is it possible to believe that genetic engineers can, with relative ease, fix all our biological dilemmas. There are simply not enough genes to account for the complexity of human life or of human disease. — Bruce H. Lipton

In Iran's future Islamic system everyone can express their opinion, and the Islamic government will respond to logic with logic. — Ruhollah Khomeini

As a Christian, but also as a scientist responsible for overseeing the Human Genome Project, one of my concerns has been the limits on applications of our understanding of the genome. Should there be limits? I think there should. I think the public has expressed their concern about ways this information might be misused. — Francis Collins

The ever quickening advances of science made possible by the success of the Human Genome Project will also soon let us see the essences of mental disease. Only after we understand them at the genetic level can we rationally seek out appropriate therapies for such illnesses as schizophrenia and bipolar disease. — James D. Watson

Nobody should force you to do a bad piece of work in your whole life - no client, no creative director, nobody. The job isn't to please the client; the job is to produce something for the client that makes them incredibly successful. — George Lois