Sam Kean Quotes

Some genetic variants can be informative about one's risk for Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.

Another interesting field, which is my own, is cofactors, not only to the disease but also to transmission. I am still puzzled by the fact that you get more sexual transmission in some ethnic populations. One way to answer this is to look for genetic factors.

Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.

If your DNA profile puts you at a higher risk of developing obesity, that doesn't mean it's your fate. You can take control of the environmental side of the equation and reduce your overall lifetime risk by a lot.

My wife and I had been to the genetic counselor; my wife is not Jewish - she's the shiksha goddess type - and was negative for everything. But I was positive. I carried the gene for three genetic disorders, which, if she had been positive for, we would have passed down to the child.

Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.

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

Some forms of motor neuron disease are genetically linked, but I have no indication that my kind is. No other member of my family has had it. But I would be in favour of abortion if there was a high risk.

Is there something in my genetic makeup that makes me more at risk for heart disease? I believe there is. My father was the sign.

If a test showed you had telomere shortening, it would be a red flag suggesting you should take a look at possible risk factors.

The fact that I have a risk genetically for Alzheimer's and blindness is not great news. But the reality is that any one of us will have dozens of these risks, and what we have to learn is how to deal with them.

A person's health isn't generally a reflection of genes, but how their environment is influencing them. Genes are the direct cause of less than 1pc of diseases: 99pc is how we respond to the world.

My sister learned she was a carrier for a recessive disease, Bloom syndrome, late in one of her pregnancies. I remember the panicked call and the weeks of worry as she and her husband awaited his test results; if he was also a carrier, this meant their daughter had a one in four chance of being born with the disorder.

My own area of expertise is the genetics of human disease. I was fortunate to be part of the team that found the genes for cystic fibrosis, and Huntington's disease and neurofibromatosis.

Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic terms. When we read about the latest discovery of a link between a gene and a disease, we imagine that we've learned the cause of the disease, and we may even think we'll get a cure by fixing the gene.

Many people assume the diseases that kill us are pre-programmed into our genes. High blood pressure by 55, heart attacks at 60, maybe cancer at 70, and so on... But for most of the leading causes of death, our genes usually account for only 10-20 per cent of risk.

Improvement in social conditions will not compensate for a bad hereditary influence.

Many health organizations discourage patients from learning their ApoE genotype. They warn that people may not be able to cope with bad news or will misinterpret the results.

You can get so much value just from being genotyped.

I've come to the conclusion that you shouldn't have to see a genetic counselor. It should be a choice.

Genes are thought to contribute a certain amount to the cause of autism but it's not 100 per cent. It might be about 60 per cent genetic. So there are going to be environmental factors that mediate the impact of autism.

The involvement of clinicians, researchers, and, most importantly, the thousands of people who have donated DNA samples will help us to correlate genetic variation with individual variation in health and disease and help to deliver on the long-term promise of the Human Genome Project.

Everyone recognises that genes are part of the story but autism isn't 100% genetic. Even if you have identical twins who share all their genes, you can find that one has autism and one doesn't. That means that there must be some non-genetic factors.

I don't suffer from SCD myself, but I do carry the gene. This means that if I married another person who carried the gene, there would be a danger our children would suffer from the disease.

The goal of getting your genome done is not to tell you what you will die from, but it's how to learn how to take action to prevent disease.