Language Quote by Siddhartha Mukherjee

“An analogy to natural language illustrates the point. The letters A,C, and T convey very little meaning by themselves, but can be combined in ways to produce substantially different messages. It is, once again, the sequence that carries the message: the words act, tac, and cat, for instance, arise…” quote by Siddhartha Mukherjee — Download Open image

““An analogy to natural language illustrates the point. The letters A,C, and T convey very little meaning by themselves, but can be combined in ways to produce substantially different messages. It is, once again, the sequence that carries the message: the words act, tac, and cat, for instance, arise from the same letters, yet signal vastly different meanings.””

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient.

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“A note of caution: epigenetics is also on the verge of transforming into a dangerous idea. Epigenetic modifications of genes can potentially superpose historical and environmental information on cells and genomes—but this capacity is speculative, limited, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable: a parent with an experience of starvation produces children with obesity and overnourishment, while a father with the experience of tuberculosis,…

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“I had a novice's hunger for history, but also a novice's inability to envision it.”

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“Any extrapolation of history into the future presupposes an environment of static discovery—an oxymoron.”

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“Six decades and two years, no more than a passing glance of time, separate Mendel's initial experiments on peas and the court-mandated sterilization of…

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“We now know that cells have ancient detectors that recognize viral genes and stamp them with chemical marks, like cancellation signs, to prevent their…

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“Familial schizophrenia (like normal human features such as intelligence and temperament) is thus highly heritable but only moderately inheritable. In other words, genes-hereditary determinants-are crucially important to the future development of the disorder. If you possess a particular combination of genes, the chance of developing the illness is extremely high: hence the striking concordance among identical twins. On the other…

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“But the pigs--seventy pounds of porcine weight that did not take kindly to weekly endoscopies--did not sprout any ulcers. And testing the theory on humans was ethically impossible: how could one justify infecting a human with a new, uncharacterized species of bacteria to prove that it caused gastritis and predisposed to cancer? In July 1984, with his experiments stalled and…

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“One of the four genes used by Yamanaka to reverse cellular fate is called c-myc. Myc, the rejuvenating factor, is no ordinary gene: it is one of the most forceful regulators of cell growth and metabolism known in biology. Activated abnormally, it can certainly coax an adult cell back into an embryo-like state, thereby enabling Yamanaka's cell-fate reversal experiment (this…

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