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Epigenetics Quotes

Quotes tagged as "epigenetics" Showing 1-24 of 24
Nessa Carey
“Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections - that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It's hard to imagine this, so let's visualise each connection as a disc that's 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion discs on top of each other and they will reach the sun (which is ninety-three million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.”
Nessa Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution

Bret Weinstein
“There is data [on race and intelligence]. My claim is that it doesn't mean what we think it means. There isn't enough work; there aren't enough people who have done the work � and the definition...I mean, trust me: "heritable" is a serious problem.

Because...for example, let's say that there was a belief that people who had a brow ridge, or something, were stupid. And that belief was widespread. And that brow ridge was genetically encoded, and it resulted in people going into the world and facing discrimination in school, let's say, because the brow ridge connoted to the teachers that they were not likely to be intelligent, and therefore they were given simpler lessons; they got dumbtracked or something like that.

That would show up as a genetically heritable difference in intelligence between brow-ridged people and non-brow-ridged people. That does not mean that it was encoded in the genome and that it was the brain that was blueprinted...what it means is that some feature that was encoded in the genome caused the environment to interact with the individual in a way that then produced a difference in intellect.

[...] It is so early in the study of this stuff, we really don't know. And the taboo nature of those questions is causing a vacuum that is being filled with an artificially pure (and probably not correct) perspective.”
Bret Weinstein

Amit Ray
“The scientific knowledge derived from genetics, epigenetics, and neuroscience, should be used to enhance the power of meditation and to eliminate the sufferings of humanity.”
Amit Ray, Yoga The Science of Well-Being

Amit Ray
“Ayurveda is not just a few medicines or a few scriptures, but a holistic total lifestyle deeply involved with yoga, meditation, food habits and epigenetic social cultures.”
Amit Ray, Yoga The Science of Well-Being

Woodson Merrell
“This exciting new field of epigenetics--meaning literally "around" the gene--allows us to see how environmental factors alter our gene expression in a specific place within each cell. As a result, we now know that when we take active control of these factors, we can literally help control our health and genetic destiny.”
Woodson Merrell, The Detox Prescription: Supercharge Your Health, Strip Away Pounds, and Eliminate the Toxins Within

Robert M. Sapolsky
“This is the essence of gene/environment interaction. What does having a particular variant of the MAO-A gene have to do with antisocial behavior? It depends on the environment. “Warrior gene� my ass.”
Robert Sapolsky

“The depth at which we take in the preceding generations astonishes me. There is likely an epigenetic component to this as well as transmission through the internalizations that get passed down through the generations. Whole cultures are carried forward that way, so it makes sense that family legacies might be transmitted that way as well.”
Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

Nancy Mairs
“Only after many years will I recognize that I, too, have survived a loss, and not necessarily intact. The depression and multiple sclerosis awaiting me will suggest that changes in the structural level have already occurred by the time I learn to forgive Daddy for abandoning me without even saying good-bye.”
Nancy Mairs, Remembering The Bone House

James Hollis
“Charles experienced a shamanic visitation �
The haw is in the air and I hear its screech. The hawk flies about me, then I can feel its talons on my scalp. It lets go and faces me. I look into its eyes. The hawk is ancient yet I seem to know who he is. The hawk speaks, "I am the spirits from the past, and I come to you because it is difficult for you to to come to us."
[When Charles resists the hawk digs its talons into his face and pecks at him.] I fall on my back and shout out to the hawk that I will follow his commands. The beat of the hawk's wings heal the wounds as if I was never attacked.
I gaze into the hawk's eyes and see unhappy spirits walking among the trees in a single file. they are roped together and walk in silence, gloom, despair. At the front of the line are my parents, and behind them are their parents, and parents going back in time.
The hawk tells me that I must loosen the rope that binds them together. I tell the hawk that I do not know how to do this, but the hawk bestows a feather on me that tells me that I "have one life in which to find these spirits. And do not forget that the spirits need you.

James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

Andrew B. Newberg
“Certain positive words—like “peace� or “love”—may actually have the power to alter the expression of genes throughout the brain and body, turning them on and off in ways that lower the amount of physical and emotional stress we normally experience throughout the day.”
Andrew B. Newberg, Words Can Change Your Brain: 12 Conversation Strategies to Build Trust, Resolve Conflict, and Increase Intimacy

Thomas Hayden
“All sorts of changes in cellular machinery have shown up that have nothing to do with the sequence of DNA but still have profound, and heritable, impacts for generations to come. For example, malnourished rats give birth to undersized pups that, even if well fed, grow up to give birth to undersized pups. Which means, among other things, that poor old Lamarck was right—at least some acquired traits can be passed down.”
Thomas Hayden

Siddhartha Mukherjee
“Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body structures and behaviors. These roles, Reinberg learned, are often determined not by genes but by signals from the physical and social environment. 'Sibling ants, in their larval stage, become segregated into the different types based on environmental signals,' he said. 'Their genomes are nearly identical, but the way the genes are used—turned on or off, and kept on or off—must determine what an ant "becomes." It seemed like a perfect system to study epigenetics. And so Shelley and I caught a flight to Arizona to see Jürgen Liebig, the ant biologist, in his lab.'

The collaboration between Reinberg, Berger, and Liebig has been explosively successful—the sort of scientific story ('two epigeneticists walk into a bar and meet an entomologist') that works its way into a legend. Carpenter ants, one of the species studied by the team, have elaborate social structures, with queens (bullet-size, fertile, winged), majors (bean-size soldiers who guard the colony but rarely leave it), and minors (nimble, grain-size, perpetually moving foragers). In a recent, revelatory study, researchers in Berger’s lab injected a single dose of a histone-altering chemical into the brains of major ants. Remarkably, their identities changed; caste was recast. The major ants wandered away from the colony and began to forage for food. The guards turned into scouts. Yet the caste switch could occur only if the chemical was injected during a vulnerable period in the ants� development.

[...] The impact of the histone-altering experiment sank in as I left Reinberg’s lab and dodged into the subway. [...] All of an ant’s possible selves are inscribed in its genome. Epigenetic signals conceal some of these selves and reveal others, coiling some, uncoiling others. The ant chooses a life between its genes and its epigenes—inhabiting one self among its incipient selves.”
Siddhartha Mukherjee

Elizabeth Garden
“Did his crime give others some kind of implicit permission to behave the same way, reverberating on and on into the future?”
Elizabeth Garden, TREE OF LIVES: My rocky path out of the Wildwoods

Bessel van der Kolk
“My colleague Rachel Yehuda studied rates of PTSD in adult New Yorkers who had been assaulted or rapes. Those whose mothers were Holocaust survivors with PTSD had a significantly higher rate of developing serious psychological problems after these traumatic experiences. The most reasonable explanation is that their upbringing had left them with a vulnerable physiology, making it difficult for them to regain their equilibrium after being violated. Yehuda found a similar vulnerability in the children of pregnant women who were in the World Trade Center that fatal day in 2001. Similarly, the reactions of children to painful events are largely determined by how calm or stressed their parents are.”
Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Dmitry Dyatlov
“We had a class called Theory of Knowledge, taught by a Catholic family man we later found out was strongly attracted to little boys� so I guess the point of the class was you don’t know shit. The past few years, I found out that there’s Neurogenesis, which means we *do* make new brain cells. And I found out about Epigenetics, which basically means Lamarck was more right than Darwin� so that does away with a lot of shit I still remember from science classes from not too long ago. I read books that show the Jews did 911 (not Osama) and a guy named McPherson keeps telling us that we’re all gonna die in a few years anyway. Make each day count�”
Dmitry Dyatlov

“From the famed but ethically bankrupt experiments of Harry Harlow, to the excruciating testimonies of refugees and concentration camp survivors, science and history are replete with the mind-shattering and life-altering impacts of psychological trauma. For carnivores, the story is eerily similar. With drastic losses of habitat, a constant threat from hunters, high mortality, and unreliable food sources, life for the average carnivore has changed dramatically and rapidly from historic norms. Under highly stressful physical or emotional conditions (food deprivation, decreased habitat, loss of one's mother, social disruption), species-normative brain processes are compromised. What goes around on the outside, comes around on the inside. Each unusual change in the environment telegraphs directly into the brain and body, altering the organism's inner blueprint. These neuroepigenetic changes then are expressed as variations in personality, stress regulation, and immunological resilience. The result is a puma who is not quite a puma.”
G.A. Bradshaw, Carnivore Minds: Who These Fearsome Animals Really Are

Alex M. Vikoulov
“Technocultural evolution driven by epigenetic and memetic factors, the collective will of humanity to emulate the most successful achievements of Nature with technology, proceeds now millions of times faster than genetic evolution of our species at an ever-accelerating pace.”
Alex M. Vikoulov, TECHNOCULTURE: The Rise of Man

Tom Golway
“Epidemiology is an ever evolving science since predictive models have significant sensitive dependencies on initial assumptions - Tom Golway”
Tom Golway

“You are the foods you consume AND the information that you digest.”
Michael Corthell

“In every human being genomes tell the story of our evolution, written in the language of DNA. The narrative is unmistakable and ever changing.”
Michael Corthell

Shawn  Wells
“When we talk about bio-individuality, we are saying that each of us is an individual combination of genetics, epigenetics, body sizes, genders, environmental consequences and biological profiles.”
Shawn Wells, The Energy Formula: Six life changing ingredients to unleash your limitless potential

“There is compelling evidence to argue that cells can sense and respond to the stiffness of their ECM and that they transmit these cues to the nucleus to alter their shape and modify their chromatin accessibility either directly or indirectly by modulating cellular metabolism. What has yet to be determined is whether these tension-induced changes in chromatin modification and chromosomal localization are accompanied by specific differences in gene expression and whether altering the metabolic state of the cell could modify these phenotypes. Moreover, whether similar effect occur in fibrotic, stiffened tumor tissues and if this influences gene expression to drive a tumor-like behavior in the cells and tissue remain unclear.”
R. Oria, D. Thakar, and V. M. Weaver

Sol Luckman
“Epigenetics reveals that your body isn’t a genetically predetermined flesh robot, but is regulated by a set of gene switches that can be turned on or off—by you—mindfully. Ergo, our genes aren’t our destiny. We have far more control over their expression than most ever imagined.”
Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

Sol Luckman
“Whether we like it or not, we’re walking placebo and nocebo generators, able to create health miracles or disasters (usually without even realizing we’re the ones doing so) practically in the blink of an eye.”
Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality