Beth Shapiro > Quotes

“the golden toad was the only Bufo to display such a striking orange color. What if the proteins that made the orange color had some undiscovered medical purpose, or psychoactive properties? We’ll never know until somebody licks one, and for that we’ll have to bring it back.”
― Beth Shapiro, How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction

“For several weeks, I sat in the dark damp cold of the library’s basement, resisting the surprisingly potent lure to get warm by drinking hot tea or setting books on fire,”
― Beth Shapiro, Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature

“First, taking males rather than females would ensure that the herd could continue to reproduce. Second, the targeted removal of local males may have attracted males from nearby herds. This new strategy essentially allowed the hunters to have their sheep and eat them too.”
― Beth Shapiro, Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature

“While creating products that benefit consumers explicitly will no doubt improve the reputation of genetically engineered foods, consumers must also be able to evaluate the risk. This means differentiating facts from the cacophony of lies and distorted half truths about GMOs.”
― Beth Shapiro, Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined―and Redefined―Nature

“Glowing technology was also used to track success while engineering the first transgenic dog, Ruppy, short for Ruby Puppy. Ruppy was born in South Korea in 2009, one of a litter of four cloned beagles engineered by scientists at Seoul National University to express a red fluorescent protein gene. The experiment was a proof of concept; the team only intended to show that transgenic dogs could be cloned. Ruppy and her genetically identical littermates looked like perfectly normal beagles under natural light. But under ultraviolet light, they all glowed a charming, bright, ruby red. When Ruppy was mated to a non-transgenic dog, half her puppies inherited the red protein gene, indicating that the transgene had incorporated successfully into her germ line.”
― Beth Shapiro, Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature

“Over the last 50,000 years, we transformed the plants and animals with which we share our planet into lineages that are exquisitely adapted to today’s world, where the dominant evolutionary force is us.”
― Beth Shapiro, Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature