Extra Chromosome Quotes

Maybe it had something to do with that extra X chromosome. Something about having a uterus and a set of ovaries just made a person intrinsically more curious and infinitely more nosy.

The thing about Maya was it was like that extra chromosome was filled to bursting with love. So filled up, it wa constantly leaking out of her in some shouty way, and she just couldn't keep it insinde her. It hat to come out in some way, shape or form.

Most notably, perhaps, children with Down syndrome have an extraordinary sweetness of temperament, as if in inheriting an extra chromosome they had acquired a concomitant loss of cruelty and malice (if there is any doubt that genotypes can influence temperament or personality, then a single encounter with a Down child can lay that idea to rest).

I have autism

The revolution caused by the sharing of experience and the spread of knowledge had begun. The Chinese, a thousand years ago, gave it further impetus by devising mechanical means of reproducing such marks in great numbers. In Europe, Johann Gutenberg independently, though much later, developed the technique of printing from movable type. Today, our libraries, the descendants of those mud tablets, can be regarded as immense communal brains, memorising far more than any one human brain could hold. More than that, they can be seen as extra-corporeal DNA, adjuncts to our genetic inheritance as important and influential in determining the way we behave as the chromosomes in our tissues are in determining the physical shape of our bodies. It was this accumulated wisdom that eventually enabled us to devise ways of escaping the dictates of the environment. Our knowledge of agricultural techniques and mechanical devices, of medicine and engineering, of mathematics and space travel, all depend on stored experience. Cut off from our libraries and all they represent and marooned on a desert island, any one of us would be quickly reduced to the life of a hunter-gatherer.

a typical chromosomal DNA molecule in a human being is composed of about five billion pairs of nucleotides… But since there are four different kinds of nucleotides, the number of bits of information in DNA is four times the number of nucleotide pairs. Thus if a single chromosome has five billion (5 X 10^9) nucleotides, it contains twenty billion (2 X 10^10) bits of information… We also see that if more than some tens of billions (several times 10^10) of bits of information are necessary for human survival, extragenetic systems will have to provide them: the rate of development of genetic systems is so slow that no source of such additional biological information can be sought in the DNA.

Richard Speck, the Chicago mass murderer of nine student nurses, was the only infamous subject found to have an extra Y chromosome.

If you think about most genetic diseases, they’re caused by one gene, and in fact one mutation at one amino acid,” said Roger Reeves, a leading researcher in the field and professor at the Institute for Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “With Down syndrome, you have an extra copy of all five hundred or so genes on chromosome 21.” For decades, Lejeune’s discovery served to scare off scientists from any serious effort to find a medical treatment for what they were soon calling “trisomy 21.” It just seemed impossibly complex.

chromosomes. Normal aging happens because the chromosomes don’t regenerate all the way to their ends during the DNA replication cycle. Telomeres protect the information in those chromosomes; telomerase is the enzyme that activates the telomeres to replicate and replace themselves as they fall off. You have extra-long telomeres protecting your chromosomes, which might have already been genetic, or it might have come with the porphyria mutation when you were infected. We think that infection locked onto your DNA and has super-promoted your telomerase. So even if your telomeres were inclined to fall off as they normally would – a process that would allow the chromosomes to alter and change – your rocket-fuel telomerase makes new telomeres so fast there’s no time for apoptosis.

The thing about Maya was it was like that extra chromosome was filled to bursting with love. So filled up, it was constantly leaking out of her in some shouty way, and she just couldn't keep it inside her. It had to come out in some way, shape or form. But I guessed when you love someone, you put up with all their faults, even the especially loud ones.

In her memoir, Expecting Adam, Martha Beck writes, “If you’ll cast your mind back to high school biology, you may remember that a species is defined, in part, by the number of chromosomes in every individual. Adam’s extra chromosome makes him as dissimilar from me as a mule is from a donkey. Adam doesn’t just do less than a ‘normal’ child his age might; he does different things. He has different priorities, different tastes, different insights.” Beck writes of the transformations her son has wrought in her own life. “The immediacy and joy with which he lives his life make rapacious achievement, Harvard-style, look a lot like quiet desperation. Adam has slowed me down to the point where I notice what is in front of me, its mystery and beauty, instead of thrashing my way through a maze of difficult requirements toward labels and achievements that contain no joy in themselves.” Children with Down syndrome tend to retain what the experts call babyfaceness. These children have “a small, concave nose with a sunken bridge, smaller features, larger forehead and shorter chin, and fuller cheeks and rounder chin, resulting in a rounder face.” A recent study found that both the register in which parents speak to their DS child and the variances in pitch resembled the voice patterns parents use to speak to infants and young children.

If you have two X chromosomes, as most women do, it’s incredibly unlikely that you’ll end up being red-green color-blind, whereas roughly 10 percent of men are. If red-green color vision was obviously selected for in diurnal primates, why was it located on the X chromosome? It’s possible this type of color vision was more advantageous for the primate Eve than for her consorts and sons. Perhaps being more efficient at spotting more nutritive foodstuffs (extra-sweet berries, extra-tender young leaves) made a real difference in pregnancy and breast-feeding. If Purgi utilized the same sex-specific parenting strategies as many living primates do, foraging for herself and her infant offspring, then the survival of the young depended far more on the female than the male. In other words, there was more pressure to see red and green on the newly diurnal Purgi than there was on her male counterparts. The second possibility is that Purgi foraged for food with a group, as some of today’s New World monkeys do. In that scenario, it’d be advantageous to have both trichromatics and dichromatics working together, grazing not only in daylight but in the dim light at dawn and dusk, when the dichromats would be better at finding the good stuff. Or both of these things were true: our Eve, as the female, had the most pressure on her to be able to see red and green, but in a highly social species that did some amount of food sharing, it would have been advantageous to have some dichromats, too.

Down's is an interesting condition. Throw an extra chromosome in there, and it effects the way seemingly every other gene is expressed. It's almost as if you take the individual's raw genetic material and put a very distinctive mask over it.

When children are brought into the world with an extra chromosome—with Down syndrome, that is—the first words parents often hear are, 'I’m sorry,' as if Down syndrome itself is something to be down about. It’s not. I want to say, 'Congratulations.' I want to say, 'What a beautiful gift you’ve brought into the world, one more being here for a reason, here with purpose.' I want to say, 'Oh, mama,' or 'Oh, dad—this new little being is going to lift you up.

Plant breeders realized early on that by breeding plants with entirely duplicated genomes, the offspring will sometimes have extra sets of chromosomes and be more vibrant or tastier. Nobody knows why, but some think the extra genetic material is put to new uses to make growth and metabolism more robust.