Epigenetics Quotes

The science of epigenetics has also made it clear that there are two mechanisms by which organisms pass on hereditary information. Those two mechanisms provide a way for scientists to study both the contribution of nature (genes) and the contribution of nurture (epigenetic mechanisms) in human behavior. If you only focus on the blueprints, as scientists have been doing for decades, the influence of the environment is impossible to fathom. (Dennis 2003; Chakravarti and Little 2003) ~ Bruce H. Lipton

What do we inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens - that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube - formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine - at least not in the physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village - and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life. ~ Dani Shapiro

Epigenetics is "the study of heritable changes in gene activity that are not caused by changes in the DNA sequence." This means that vital information learned by one generation is genetically transferred to the next. Before epigenetics was discovered, it was thought that genes could not learn because the DNA codes that express them do not provide that option. In other words, DNA is the blueprint that determines gene expression, but epigenetics and other mindbody research is showing that the expression is affected by contextual conditions; Mother Nature sets rules to be questioned, not to be blindly obeyed. ~ Mario Martinez

Of course, we have all always known that our experiences affect our minds, and therefore, our brains; but work on epigenetics has revealed a mechanistic way in which the things we learn, and information about our environment, can be physically incorporated into our brains. ~ David S. Moore

The piano keys represent the genome. We each get different keys, and the keys don't change throughout our life: we die with the same piano keys, or genome, we're born with. What changes is the sheet music: the epigenetics. That sheet of music determines what tune is played - what genes are expressed - and those genes determine our traits - everything from IQ to hair color. ~ A.G. Riddle

The study of how substances alter gene expression is part of the field of epigenetics. Some chemical exposures appear to turn on and turn off genes in ways that disregulate cell growth and predispose for cancer. From this perspective, our genes are less the command-and-control masters of our cells and more like the keys of piano, with the environment as the hands of the pianist. ~ Sandra Steingraber

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

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

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. ~ Bruce Lipton