DNA Quote: Dr. John Groopman

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted September 21, 2007 in DNA Quotes and Excerpts

Dr. John Groopman in the Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine feature - The Genetic Journey:

Humans are 99.2 percent similar to a chimpanzee, but as [Hopkins cancer researcher] Don Coffey has pointed out, no chimpanzee has ever written a piano concerto. Why is that? Well, in addition to epigenetics, it’s because of our cell signaling pathways. They are truly the wiring network in our cells. When they’re triggered, they lead to a specific set of expressions of genes, telling a cell to proliferate, to die, to send out new blood vessels… These signaling pathways are how a cell does all these things. I’ll go out on a limb here: Most human disease is driven at the end of the day by these signaling pathways getting messed up and leading to disease too early in life.

Tags: genetics, genes, dna, molecular biology, john groopman, science, quotes

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2 Comments »

Comment by David Bradley

2007-09-21 19:41:21

I love that concerto quote, but if we were a little more like chimps, say 99.3% we wouldn’t have to worry about razor burn either

db

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Comment by Hsien-Hsien Lei, PhD

2007-09-22 00:05:54

Maybe you wouldn’t have to, but I’d like to think I’d be a chimp that still cared about such things.

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