Chance is hugely significant in biology. In fact, the presence of apparent randomness in so many aspects of biology - from mutations in DNA to the chance involved in that one sperm reaching that one egg that became you - suggests that randomness is useful, even necessary, in very many cases.
Alice Roberts
In our evolutionary narratives, the organism itself often seems to play a passive role: a powerless victim, almost, of changes to its environment or mutations in its genes.
Just as your own existence is unlikely and far from inevitable, the evolution of modern humans as a species depended on a whole string of chance events - some happening in the environments our ancestors inhabited, and some inside their own bodies, including random mutations in their DNA.
I think, with every kind of creature and every kind of human, there is no better. We're all just mutations, and I think that each mutation should be celebrated.
Arca
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
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
This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.
Craig Mazin
You would think that UV just causes mutations, but it doesn't; you need a gene to be active for it.
Cynthia Kenyon
In the early '90s, we discovered mutations that could double the normal life span of worms.
Let's face it: pop music in its myriad permutations will always be sexually presumptuous, racially controversial and, frequently, politically charged.
Dan Hill
First of all, many human diseases are influenced by, if not caused by mutations in genes.
Daniel Nathans
There are certain mutations you can find across cancers in different organs.
Eric Topol
Color is a big part of what I do. It's like music. There are only so many notes in the scale, but there are endless permutations; there's no limit to the number. Color on the walls or furniture can reflect back and distort the reality of the true colors of lipsticks and eye shadow.
Evelyn Lauder
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
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.
Just like mutations to DNA in biological organisms allow for evolution through natural selection, forking lets us run multiple experiments in parallel where the strongest versions survive.
Fred Ehrsam
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
What dinosaur traits are missing from an ostrich? The ostrich has a toothless beak, but there are mutations that cause teeth and claws to come back to their mouth and limbs. You need to replace the feathers with scales, but there are no feathers on their legs and feet, so you just need to make its whole body like its legs are.
George M. Church
Clearly, we are a species that is well connected to other species. Whether or not we evolve from them, we are certainly very closely related to them. A series of mutations could change us into all kinds of intermediate species. Whether or not those intermediate species are provably in the past, they could easily be in our future.
We've gone through many different permutations of coffee-making, from grinding our own beans to the regular drip to an iced coffee maker.
Jake Tapper
When people go to the theater, people say they want something different, but what they really want is something the same with slight permutations. To really not know what is going to happen next is a hard thing.
I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.
Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.
Every batch of sperm represents an opportunity for genetic typos - called de novo mutations - to be passed on. A 20-year-old man and woman will each pass on about 20 de novo mutations to a baby they conceive. By the time the couple is 40, a woman's total has remained at 20, while a man's has jumped to 65 - and it keeps climbing from there.
There's already a lot of active research going on using the Crispr technology to fix diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease. They're all diseases that have known genetic causes, and we now have the technology that can repair those mutations to provide, we hope, patients with a normal life.
I'm sure there was some part of his soul was intrinsically happy, but he probably had to go through some permutations to really get that to blossom. I'm sure Dad had his challenges, but I think that joy was there from the beginning and he had to find a way to make his life support that and express that.
Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.
Of all the questions I get asked as an undocumented immigrant in the United States, there are two - asked in various permutations via email, social media or in person - that chill me to the bone: 'Why don't you just make yourself legal?' And: 'Why don't you get in the back of the line?'
I was briefly in the original version of 'Tombstone,' but I didn't make the final cut because that movie went through a couple of different permutations.
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.
The reduction in gun violence President Obama claims to desperately want comes from law enforcement and prosecution, not from political rhetoric, lectures and sentence commutations for federal firearm law offenders and felons.
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.
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.
When you have a situation that's destructive, when there's tremendous inhumanity everywhere, you see how humanity survives in all of its different permutations.
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.
Our science and advisory board think that nuclear lamin dysfunction is a side-effect of DNA damage and mutations, rather than the cause. We are currently trying to mend nuclear dysfunction using Human Telomerase reverse transcriptase.
I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
When any fat is heated to frying temperatures, toxic volatile chemicals that can cause genetic mutations are released into the air.
When you see 'editor' on a book, there are many permutations of what that title can mean.
There's almost no food that isn't genetically modified. Genetic modification is the basis of all evolution. Things change because our planet is subjected to a lot of radiation, which causes DNA damage, which gets repaired, but results in mutations, which create a ready mixture of plants that people can choose from to improve agriculture.
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.
Writers begin changing the instant they append 'The End' to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even the novels themselves, through the strange transmutations of time and shifting tastes and mores, exhibit changes as we look backward upon them, acquiring retroactive meanings and tonalities.
Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If we didn't have genetic mutations, we wouldn't have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible.
Bacteria evolve, and so they become resistant to existing drugs. Sometimes they revert, depending on how damaging the mutation is to the life cycle of the bacteria. Mutations that give rise to resistance against particular compounds do increase, and that is why you constantly have to have new ones.
