Quotes About Mutations

#1. New mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired.

Lynn Margulis

#2. Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

Bertrand Russell

#3. This seems highly likely, especially as it has been shown that in several systems mutations affecting the same amino acid are extremely near together on the genetic map.

Francis Crick

#4. Although not yet routine, many cancer centers have the technology to sequence some or all of a patient's cancer genome. This can provide massive amounts of valuable information about your cancer, including whether you have genetic mutations and other abnormalities for which new drugs are available.

Kathy Giusti

#5. I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.

James Lovelock

#6. Our experience in fooling around with the genes of mice has taught us that many of the traits that interest us are not definite products of specific mutations but emergent phenomena arising from extremely complex interactions between genes, environment, and life experience.

Gary Wolf

#7. The accumulation of genetic mutations were touted to be enough to change one species to another ... .No. It wasn't dishonesty. I think it was wish fulfillment and social momentum. Assumptions, made but not verified, were taught as fact.

Lynn Margulis

#8. In Darwin's theory, you just have to substitute 'mutations' for his 'slight accidental variations' (just as quantum theory substitutes 'quantum jump' for 'continuous transfer of energy'). In all other respects little change was necessary in Darwin's theory ...

Erwin Schrodinger

#9. My idea right from the beginning, I guess, was to dismantle the immune system one gene at a time so we could track the mutations that cause problems.

Bruce Beutler

#10. We find in the history of ideas mutations which do not seem to correspond to any obvious need, and at first sight appear as mere playful whimsies such as Apollonius' work on conic sections, or the non-Euclidean geometries, whose practical value became apparent only later.

Arthur Koestler

#11. Most mutations involve typos: Something bumps a cell's elbow as it's copying DNA, and the wrong letter appears in a triplet - CAG becomes CCG.

Sam Kean

#12. I know that the human condition will be radically changed through technical means. Much of this change will be painful, monstrous and horrible. Most mutations are disgusting failures, most experiments are failures. I accept this and I don't find it frightening.

Bruce Sterling

#13. Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.

Robert Smithson

#14. There is no mechanism of selection in the history of ideas akin to that of the natural selection of genetic mutations in evolution

John Gray

#15. In the early '90s, we discovered mutations that could double the normal life span of worms.

Cynthia Kenyon

#16. There are certain mutations you can find across cancers in different organs.

Eric Topol

#17. Right. Mutation is the trigger that moves evolution forward. So, how do mutations happen?

Koji Suzuki

#18. Rather than say that the bacterium gained resistance to the antibiotic, we would be more correct to say that it lost its sensitivity to it. It lost information ... Information cannot be built up by mutations that lose it. A business can't make money by losing it a little at a time.

Lee Spetner

#19. The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We're not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of

Yuval Noah Harari

#20. A final proof of our ideas can only be obtained by detailed studies on the alterations produced in the amino acid sequence of a protein by mutations of the type discussed here.

Francis Crick

#21. There's no denying his resemblance to the Rodin bronze - the slender, effortless muscularity of youth, the extravagant nonchalance of it; that sense that beauty is in fact the natural human condition and not the rarest of mutations.

Michael Cunningham

#22. D.N.A. sequences change by mutations, and the idea behind the molecular clock is that those changes occur at, more or less, a constant rate, over time.

Mark Stoneking

#23. After observing mutations in fruit flies for many years, Professes Goldschmidt fell into despair. The changes, he lamented, were so hopelessly micro [insignificant] that if a thousand mutations were combined in one specimen, there would still be no new species.

Norman Macbeth

#24. When you get sick with the flu you get infected with flu viruses and they make lots of new flu viruses, but those new viruses are not exact copies of the old ones. They have mutations in them. A lot of those mutations are harmful.

Carl Zimmer

#25. No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.

Pierre-Paul Grasse

#26. 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.

Sam Kean

#27. Mutations are exciting. They try to fix 'em when they come out. Did you see the two-headed baby they killed last month when they tried to cut it apart? That was hilarious!

Doug Stanhope

#28. In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection
quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology.

Arthur Koestler

#29. In the event of atomic war there is a tremendous biological advantage in the so-called undeveloped areas that have a high birth rate and high death rate because, man, they can plow under those mutations.

William S. Burroughs

#30. Mutations are exciting, there aren't nearly enough of them.

Doug Stanhope

#31. Among the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things ... only one, which began a century and a half ago ... has allowed the figure of man to appear.

Michel Foucault

#32. Programmed by quanta, physics gave rise first to chemistry and then to life; programmed by mutations and recombination, life gave rise to Shakespeare; programmed by experience and imagination, Shakespeare gave rise to Hamlet.

Seth Lloyd

#33. The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

Lionel Trilling

#34. Choose your mutations carefully.

Mark Mothersbaugh

#35. Exploitation, mutilation, mutations, confirmation to the evils of the world.

Stevie Wonder

#36. Cancer is really a slew of rare diseases. Lung cancer has 700 sub-types, breast cancer has 30,000 mutations which means that every cancer in its own right is a rare disease. Sharing data globally in this context is really important from a life-threatening perspective.

Patrick Soon-Shiong

#37. I simply find it impossible to believe that the human drama of the centuries, with its quest for meaning and beauty and truth, has no deeper root than molecular mutations.

John Piper

#38. It is probably fair to estimate the frequency of a majority of mutations, in higher organisms, between one in ten thousand and one in a million per gene per generation.

Francisco J. Ayala

#39. She's not trying to make Radiasure, Fi. Allie is trying to cure mutations.

Natalie Whipple

#40. The very effect of X-rays killing rapidly dividing cells - DNA damage - also created cancer-causing mutations in genes.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#41. During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists' understanding of mutations in DNA.

James Gleick

#42. A decade or so ago, all over the world, cinemas underwent one of those prince-into-frog mutations, and became, instead popcorn-restaurants, which offered the option of visual diversions for diners.

Kevin Myers

#43. We know cancer is caused ultimately via a link between the environment and genes. There are genes inside cells that tell cells to grow and the same genes tell cells to stop growing. When you deregulate these genes, you unleash cancer. Now, what disrupts these genes? Mutations.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#44. Evolutionary plasticity can be purchased only at the ruthlessly dear price of continuously sacrificing some individuals to death from unfavourable mutations. Bemoaning this imperfection of nature has, however, no place in a scientific treatment of this subject.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#45. Without equity, pandemic battles will fail. Viruses will simply recirculate, and perhaps undergo mutations or changes that render vaccines useless, passing through the unprotected populations of the planet.

Laurie Garrett

#46. Sickness is the natural state in which we humans reside. We occasionally fall into brief brackets of health, only to return to our fevers, our infections, our rapid, minute mutations, which take us toward death even as they evolve us, as a species, into some ill-defined future.

Lauren Slater

#47. Two million years ago, genetic mutations resulted in the appearance of a new human species called Homo erectus.

Yuval Noah Harari

#48. The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.

Roland Barthes

#49. You would think that UV just causes mutations, but it doesn't; you need a gene to be active for it.

Cynthia Kenyon

#50. Maybe some people were born with the fame gene. Like race or sexual orientation or X-Men mutations, it's simply who you are, and there isn't anything you can do about it. Perhaps it's why some people are drawn to crowds and cameras while others shrink away.

Benjamin Svetkey

#51. If life really depends on each gene being as unique as it appears to be, then it is too unique to come into being by chance mutations.

Frank B. Salisbury

#52. World, world, O world! But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee/ Life would not yield to age.

William Shakespeare

#53. We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.

B.F. Skinner

#54. Murphy's face went through several mutations as he spoke, as if small animals were scurrying about just beneath his skin.

Pete Hautman

#55. Mutations pop up all over the place, but our redundant chromosomes help blunt this effect. By avoiding inbreeding, a population reduces the odds that rare and harmful mutations will pop up at the same place on both sides of the chromosome.

Randall Munroe

#56. In agriculture, people have taken wild plants that can't be eaten by people - and turned them into wonderful food sources. And that's because genomes can change, and people working with plants have picked mutations. Mutations are nothing more than genetic changes.

Nina Fedoroff

#57. First of all, many human diseases are influenced by, if not caused by mutations in genes.

Daniel Nathans

#58. The secrets of evolution are death and time - the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

Carl Sagan

#59. Things look especially bleak for common killers such as diabetes and heart disease. Those ailments clearly have a genetic component. But when scientists survey genes looking for which mutations patients have in common, they come up empty.

Sam Kean

#60. We live in a world defined by uniformity but still identify ourselves by our mutations.

Jamie Metzl

#61. How comes it to pass, if they be only moved by chance and accident, that such regular mutations and generations should be begotten by a fortuitous concourse of atoms.

John Smith

#62. All human beings are, in fact, born with dozens of mutations their parents lacked, and a few of those mutations could well be lethal if we didn't have two copies of every gene, so one can pick up the slack if the other malfunctions.

Sam Kean

#63. Why do i live? In the infinity of space, and infinity of time infinitely small particles mutate with infinite complexity. When you understand the laws of these mutations, you'll understand why you live.

Leo Tolstoy

#64. Life has survived for more than three billion years because it is robust, and almost no mutations can easily outwit the defense mechanisms built up through eons of exposure to potential pathogens.

Lawrence M. Krauss

#65. If we didn't have genetic mutations, we wouldn't have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible.

Steven Johnson

#66. Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart - the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#67. When any fat is heated to frying temperatures, toxic volatile chemicals that can cause genetic mutations are released into the air.

Michael Greger