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Book: She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become
Quotes of Book: She Has Her Mother's Laugh:
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  1. Carl Zimmer _ She Has Her Mother's Laugh:

    Chromosomes were chemical mixtures, including proteins as well as a mysterious molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA for short.
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  2. Carl Zimmer _ She Has Her Mother's Laugh:

    We humans have 23 pairs, but pea plants have only 7. Yeast have 16. Some butterflies have 134.
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  3. Carl Zimmer _ She Has Her Mother's Laugh:

    A virus does not reproduce by copying its own genes and dividing in two. Instead, it invades a host cell."
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  4. Carl Zimmer _ She Has Her Mother's Laugh:

    In 1814 the breeders founded an organization, the title of which was-deep breath-"The Association of Friends, Experts and Supporters of Sheep Breeding for the achievement of a more rapid and more thoroughgoing advancement of this branch of the economy and the manufacturing and commercial aspects of the wool industry that is based upon it." Those who didn't want to lose too much oxygen uttering the full name simply called it the Sheep Breeders' Society.
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  5. Carl Zimmer _ She Has Her Mother's Laugh:

    In 2011, a seventeen-year-old Israeli girl named Chen Aida Ayash was killed in a car accident. After her death, her parents asked for doctors to collect some eggs from her cadaver. They had to go to court to get permission, explaining to a judge that they wanted to fertilize Chen's eggs, after which Chen's aunt would bear them to term. After her own death, Chen would give her parents grandchildren.
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  6. Carl Zimmer _ She Has Her Mother's Laugh:

    The strange stripes on apples-known as twin spotting-might occur because a cell had two copies of a gene for color. One copy might be a light variant, the other dark. When the cell divided, it accidentally bequeathed two dark variants to one daughter cell, and two light ones to the other. When those cells multiplied, their daughters would inherit those new combinations. And since they grew next to each other, the result would be dark and light stripes. As geneticists studied these peculiar plants more carefully, they gave them a new name: mosaics.
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  7. Carl Zimmer _ She Has Her Mother's Laugh:

    One reason that cells break down bone is that in old age they make less of a protein called TERT. In 2012, researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre coaxed old mice to make extra TERT by giving them an extra copy of the gene. Their osteoporosis reversed, and their bones strengthened. It's conceivable that doctors could use CRISPR gene therapy to treat people as well. CRISPR molecules would home in on the TERT gene in bone cells and edit it. The gene would behave as it did when the patients were younger, strengthening their bones. But gene therapy for TERT could do a lot of other kinds of good, too. The Spanish researchers who tried it out on mice found that it also reversed aging in their muscles, their brains, and their blood. It extended the life span of old mice by 13 percent. When the scientists treated younger mice with TERT gene therapy, the animals lived 24 percent longer.
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  8. Carl Zimmer _ She Has Her Mother's Laugh:

    In the early 1900s, a Florida farmer found a notable bud sport while inspecting his grove of Walters grapefruit trees. Tree after tree bore white fruit, except one. On that tree, the farmer spotted a branch weighed down with pink fruits. From that single bud sport, all pink grapefruits descend.
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  9. Carl Zimmer _ She Has Her Mother's Laugh:

    eugenicists made a mess of traits like intelligence. They were obsessed with splitting people into two categories-healthy and feebleminded-and then they would cast the feebleminded as a "class of vast and dangerous dimensions." Penrose saw intelligence as a far more complex trait. He likened intelligence to height: In every population, most people were close to average height, but some people were taller and shorter than average. Just being short wasn't equivalent to having some kind of a height disease. Likewise, people developed a range of different mental aptitudes.
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  10. Carl Zimmer _ She Has Her Mother's Laugh:

    A child's humors might be able to weaken that impression. Or a healthy parent's seed could sometimes counter a diseased one. The defect still lurked in the child, who could then pass it down to its own children. If they didn't inherit a countervailing seed from their other parents, the disease could flare up out of hiding. Some hereditary diseases could be treated, Mercado argued, but only slowly and incompletely. "Let us in some secluded spot teach the deaf and dumb to speak by forming and articulating the voice," he wrote. "By long practice many with hereditary affliction have regained their speech and hearing." But for the most part, a doctor could do little, because the stamp of heredity was sealed away from a physician's reach. Mercado urged instead that people with the same defect not marry, because their children would be at greatest risk of developing the same hereditary disease.
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  11. Carl Zimmer _ She Has Her Mother's Laugh:

    Montaigne was a French courtier who retired from political life in 1571 to sit in a castle tower and reflect on vanity and happiness, on liars and friendship. While he found comfort in this solitude, pain intruded on his contemplation from time to time, thanks to his kidney stones. One day, Montaigne transformed the stones into grist for an essay. "It is likely I inherited the gravel from my father," Montaigne guessed, "for he died sadly afflicted by a large stone in the bladder." Yet Montaigne had no idea how one could inherit a disease, as opposed to a crown or a farm. His father had been in perfect health when Montaigne was born, and remained so for another twenty-five years. Only in his late sixties did his kidney stones first appear, and they then tormented him for the last seven years of his life. "While he was still so remote from the disease, how could the light trifle of his substance out of which he built me convey so deep an impress?" Montaigne wondered. "Where could the propensity have been brooding all this while?" Simply musing in this way was a visionary act. No one in Montaigne's day thought of traits as being distinct things that could travel down through generations. People did not reproduce; they were engendered. Life unfolded as reliably as the rising of bread or the fermenting of wine. Montaigne's doctors did not picture a propensity lurking in parents and then being reproduced in their children. A trait could not disappear and be rediscovered, like a hidden letter. Doctors did sometimes observe certain diseases that were common in certain families. But they didn't think very much about why that was so. Many simply turned to the Bible for guidance, citing the passage telling of God "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.
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  12. Carl Zimmer _ She Has Her Mother's Laugh:

    Goddard died at age ninety. In their obituary, the Associated Press remembered him for two accomplishments: coining the word moron and discovering the Kallikaks.
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