Carl Zimmer Quotes

If you're looking for your own idea of your own identity you know the human genome may not be the best place to look for it. You're just looking at a bunch of viruses.

We really depend on viruses for our complete survival.

One of the big challenges now is to figure out just how many viruses there really are in the human genome. So far the estimate is 8.3% of our genome is virus, but it actually could be a lot higher.

Viruses don't just make us sick. They can actually sometimes end up in our genomes.

The hand is where the mind meets the world.

The reason that viruses are so hard to fight, the reason for example we need a flu virus every year is that they evolve very fast.

We may be sucking in all sorts of viruses and we really don't know the full range of them. Maybe we've got flu virus inside of us. That's a possibility. Maybe we're part flu.

Borna virus is not a retrovirus. It doesn't actually insert its own genes into our cells. What it does is just hangs out near our DNA and uses some of the molecular machinery to copy itself.

Evolution is a large political controversy as to what should be taught in the schools. But there is no scientific controversy that we evolved when we talk about evidence from fossils and DNA.

Evolution has led to some populations of people being able to digest milk without much trouble when they're adults as well.

Everybody can digest milk when they're little.

It used to be thought that only a certain kind of virus could get into our genome and it's called a retrovirus and that's a virus that might be HIV for example.

Evolution has taught them that pointless harm will ultimately harm themselves.