John Sulston Quotes

If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.

We know specific genes are turned on in specific cells, but we don't know to what extent this happens.

Epigenetics doesn't change the genetic code, it changes how that's read. Perfectly normal genes can result in cancer or death. Vice-versa, in the right environment, mutant genes won't be expressed. Genes are equivalent to blueprints; epigenetics is the contractor. They change the assembly, the structure.

With DNA, you have to be able to tell which genes are turned on or off. Current DNA sequencing cannot do that. The next generation of DNA sequencing needs to be able to do this. If somebody invents this, then we can start to very precisely identify cures for diseases.

A key issue in developmental biology at that time was the problem of how cells underwent differentiation, with most workers concentrating on explanations in terms of changes in enzyme and gene regulation.

Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.

We can change the expression of more than 70 percent of the genes that have a direct bearing on our health and longevity.

It used to be thought that our genes were historically immutable and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics.

As has repeatedly been stated, the underlying hypothesis, which in a number of cases has been supported by direct experimental evidence, is that each gene controls the production, function, and specificity of a particular enzyme.

People think if you have deciphered the genome of humans that you can change everything. But you cannot change everything, because you do not know what the genes mean, and you have no methods for changing them, and you can't do experiments with humans like you can with animals.

People think genes are an absolute cause of traits. But the notion that the genome is the blueprint for humanity is a very bad metaphor. If you think we're hard-wired and deterministic, there should indeed be a lot more genes.

While weight loss is important, what's more important is the quality of food you put in your body - food is information that quickly changes your metabolism and genes.

Heredity is nothing but stored environment.

Transposons are just small pieces of DNA that randomly insert in the genetic code. And if they insert in the middle of the gene, they disrupt its function.

The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently.

I became fascinated by the then-blossoming science of molecular biology when, in my senior year, I happened to read the papers by Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod on the operon theory.

We found out that, contrary to what many people thought, in the immune system, genes can change during the life cycle of the individual.

It's a very complex network of genes making products which go into the nucleus and turn on other genes. And, in fact, you find a continuing network of processes going on in a very complex way by which genes are subject to these continual adjustments, as you might say - the computer programmer deciding which genes ultimately will work.

We all have genes that come from our ancestors that aren't used - they're not turned on. So we actually carry ancient genes with us. If you could figure out how to turn those on, you could resurrect ancient characteristics from our ancestors.

The identification of the genes which determine biological phenomena and the study of the control they exert on these phenomena has proven to be the most successful approach to a detailed understanding of the mechanism of biological processes.

RNA interference has proven to be a quite reliable mechanism for turning genes off in a whole variety of different plants and animals.

We have 100 genes or so, which we know we can't knock out without killing the cell, that are of unknown structure.

There are many ways in which genes influence the brain.

By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.

Today we try to identify a gene and then study its properties.