Microchimeric sharing means that, even if the mother loses a child, she’ll have a small memento of him or her secreted away inside her. Similarly, a bit of our mothers live on in all of us no matter how long ago Mom died. – Sam Kean
It’s often meaningless to talk about a genetic trait without also discussing the environment in which that trait appears. Sometimes, genes don’t work at all until the environment awakens them. – Sam Kean
A long iron rod rocketed straight through the very forefront of Phineas Gage’s brain. It’s kind of an unusual part of the brain: you can suffer pretty severe injuries to it and often walk away from the injury. It’s not a part of the brain that’s necessarily vital for your biological self. But it is very important for personality. – Sam Kean
Most organisms have loads of junk DNA – less pejoratively, noncoding DNA – cluttering their cells. – Sam Kean
Those of us raised in modern cities tend to notice horizontal and vertical lines more quickly than lines at other orientations. In contrast, people raised in nomadic tribes do a better job noticing lines skewed at intermediate angles, since Mother Nature tends to work with a wider array of lines than most architects. – Sam Kean
One theme I ran into over and over while writing about the periodic table was the future of energy and the question of which element or elements will replace carbon as king. – Sam Kean
Scientists didn’t discover the noble gas helium – the second most common element in the universe – on Earth until 1895. And they thought it existed in minute quantities only, until miners found a huge underground cache in Kansas in 1903. – Sam Kean
Despite its obscurity, probably no element on the periodic table has as colorful a history as antimony. Money, madness, poison, linguistics, charlatanism, sex – pretty much every theme that runs through the periodic table can be found in Element 51. – Sam Kean
If you had to sum up chemistry in one sentence, it might be this: Atoms need to have full shells of electrons to feel satisfied, and different elements steal, shed, or borrow different numbers of electrons to achieve a full shell. – Sam Kean
X-rays revealed that some people were born without a corpus callosum, and they seemed just fine. – Sam Kean
All human beings are, in fact, born with dozens of mutations their parents lacked, and a few of those mutations could well be lethal if we didn’t have two copies of every gene, so one can pick up the slack if the other malfunctions. – Sam Kean
Without a functioning hippocampus, names, dates, and other information falls straight through the mind like a sieve. – Sam Kean
I think it’s a natural human tendency, when you read something, you tend to read a lot of your prejudices into it. And neuroscience is like a lot of disciplines – it has fashions; things change. – Sam Kean
The brain, which is plastic when young, must be exposed to certain sights early in life, or it will remain blind to those sights forever. – Sam Kean
The amygdala plays a crucial role in processing fear, and minus her two amygdalae, S.M. became unflappable. Studies of her are actually a hoot to read, since they basically consist of scientists concocting ever-more-elaborate ways of trying to scare her. – Sam Kean
Geneticists in the early 1900s believed that nature – in an effort to avoid wasting precious space within chromosomes – would pack as many genes into each chromosome as possible. – Sam Kean
Most mutations involve typos: Something bumps a cell’s elbow as it’s copying DNA, and the wrong letter appears in a triplet – CAG becomes CCG. – Sam Kean
Atoms of Element 118 fill an outer shell with electrons, creating a special type of element called a noble gas. Noble gases are natural turning points on the table, ending one row and pointing to the next. – Sam Kean
The most profound change that genetics brings about might not be scientific at all. It might be mental and even spiritual enrichment: a more expansive sense of who we humans are, existentially, and where we came from, and how we fit with other life on earth. – Sam Kean
No element gets people telling crazy stories like mercury does. People have told me tales about pharmacists waxing floors with mercury, mothers rubbing it into babies’ skin to kill germs, and 10-year-olds coating dimes in it to make them shine, then blithely carrying them around in their pockets. – Sam Kean
To be sure, ASPM isn’t the gene responsible for building big brains – there’s no such single gene. But it’s critical to the process, and the primate line has almost certainly benefited from distinct changes in ASPM. – Sam Kean
Genes work with probabilities; they don’t work with certainties. So most things that you’re looking at with these genetic tests, it’s not like you’re condemned to automatically get the disease or the syndrome. There’s a lot of factors in play there. – Sam Kean
The more that I looked at DNA, the more I realized it was nature and nurture. It’s how genes and your environment work together to produce the person you are. – Sam Kean
No one knows quite the reason, but surgically severing the corpus callosum can reduce the rate and intensity of seizures. So in the early 1960s, a few patients with severe epilepsy had their corpus callosums cut, turning them into split-brain people. – Sam Kean
Before the Human Genome Project, most scientists assumed, based on our complex brains and behaviors, that humans must have around 100,000 genes; some estimates went as high as 150,000. – Sam Kean
Brain surgery couldn’t happen without the patient’s own active voice to guide the work. The patient is part of the surgical team here, perhaps the most important part, and above all, that’s what makes neurosurgery different. – Sam Kean
