Sharon Moalem > Quotes

“Why would you take a drug that is guaranteed to kill you in forty years? One reason, right? It's the only thing that will stop you dying tomorrow.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“By the way, the next time you get your cholesterol checked, make a note of the season. Because sunlight converts cholesterol to vitamin D, cholesterol levels can be higher in winter months, when we continue to make and eat cholesterol but there’s less sunlight available to convert it.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“There is one notable exception to Jablonski and Chaplin’s equation—and it’s the exception that proves the rule. The Inuit—the indigenous people of the subarctic—are dark-skinned, despite the limited sunlight of their home. If you think something fishy’s going on here, you’re right. But the reason they don’t need to evolve the lighter skin necessary to ensure sufficient vitamin D production is refreshingly simple. Their diet is full of fatty fish—which just happens to be one of the only foods in nature that is chock-full of vitamin D. They eat vitamin D for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so they don’t need to make it. If you ever had a grandmother from the Old World try to force cod liver oil down your throat, she was onto something for the same reason—since it’s full of vitamin D, cod liver oil was one of the best ways to prevent rickets, especially before milk was routinely fortified with it.   IF YOU’RE WONDERING how people who have dark skin make enough vitamin D despite the fact that their skin blocks all those ultraviolet rays, you’re asking the right questions. Remember, ultraviolet rays that penetrate the skin destroy folate—and ultraviolet rays that penetrate the skin are necessary to create vitamin D. Dark skin evolved to protect folate, but it didn’t evolve”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“As we’re about to see, by striving for even greater genetic perfection we might be eliminating a lot more than just millions of people who don’t fit the societal norms we’ve created. We might actually be eradicating the very solutions to the medical problems we’re working so hard to solve.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“Interestingly, it’s possible that practices related to the observance of Passover helped to protect Jewish neighborhoods from the plague. Passover is a week-long holiday commemorating Jews’ escape from slavery in Egypt. As part of its observance, Jews do not eat leavened bread and remove all traces of it from their homes. In many parts of the world, especially Europe, wheat, grain, and even legumes are also forbidden during Passover. Dr. Martin J. Blaser, a professor of internal medicine at New York University Medical Center, thinks this “spring cleaning” of grain stores may have helped to protect Jews from the plague, by decreasing their exposure to rats hunting for food—rats that carried the plague.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“A Canadian physiologist named Norman Kasting discovered that bleeding animals induces the release of the hormone vasopressin; this reduces their fevers and spurs their immune system into higher gear. The connection isn’t unequivocally proven in humans, but there is much correlation between bloodletting and fever reduction in the historic record. Bleeding also may have helped to fight infection by reducing the amount of iron available to feed an invader, providing an assist to the body’s natural tendency to hide iron when it recognizes an infection.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“connection between skin color and sunlight. The results were as clear as the sky on a cloudless day—there was a near-constant correlation between skin color and sunlight exposure in populations that had remained in the same area for 500 years or more. They even produced an equation to express the relationship between a given population’s skin color and its annual exposure to ultraviolet rays. (If you’re feeling adventurous, the equation is W = 70-AUV/10. W represents relative whiteness and AUV represents annual ultraviolet exposure. The 70 is based on research that indicates that the whitest possible skin—the result of a population that received zero exposure to UV—would reflect about 70 percent of the light directed at it.)”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“But what if our experiences of being bullied did a lot more than just saddle us with some serious psychological baggage? Well, to answer that question, a group of researchers from the UK and Canada decided to study sets of monozygotic “identical” twins from the age of five. Besides having identical DNA, each twin pair in the study, up until that point, had never been bullied. You’ll be glad to know that these researchers were not allowed to traumatize their subjects, unlike how the Swiss mice were handled. Instead, they let other children do their scientific dirty work. After patiently waiting for a few years, the scientists revisited the twins where only one of the pair had been bullied. When they dropped back into their lives, they found the following: present now, at the age of 12, was a striking epigenetic difference that was not there when the children were five years old. The researchers found significant changes only in the twin who was bullied. This means, in no uncertain genetic terms, that bullying isn’t just risky in terms of self-harming tendencies for youth and adolescents; it actually changes how our genes work and how they shape our lives, and likely what we pass along to future generations.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“far as to say that white-skinned people are actually black-skinned mutants who lost the ability to produce significant amounts of eumelanin. Redheads, with their characteristic milky white skin and freckles, may be a further mutation along the same lines. In order to survive in places with infrequent and weak sunlight, such as in parts of the U.K., they may have evolved in a way that almost completely knocked out their body’s ability to produce eumelanin, the brown or black pigment.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“In evolutionary terms, that means we asked for it.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“One example of the Prevention Paradox occurs in the first weeks when people with high LDL or “bad” cholesterol start taking fish oil supplements. Researchers found that using fish oil (which is high in omega-3 fatty acids from mackerel, herring, tuna, halibut, salmon, cod liver, and even whale blubber) is associated with a wide range of changes in LDL levels across the population, from down by 50 percent to up by a whopping increase of 87 percent.6 Researchers have dug deeper to demonstrate that people who supplemented their diets with the so-called healthy fats found in fish oil actually had a greater negative change in their cholesterol levels if they were carriers of a gene variant called APOE4. Meaning that supplementing with fish oil may be good for some and very bad for other people’s cholesterol levels depending on which genes they’ve inherited.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“if there’s fire on the mountain or lightning and storm and a god speaks from the sky. That means someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“You may be surprised to learn that it’s been estimated to cost up to $635 billion a year in the United States alone,8 a figure greater than the costs associated with conditions like heart disease and cancer.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote that once in a lifetime hope and history can rhyme. Evolution is what happens when history and change are in rhyme.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“microbiomes,”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“One species of lizard is born with a long tail and large body or a small tail and small body depending on one thing only—whether their mother smelled a lizard-eating snake while pregnant. When her babies are entering a snake-filled world, they are born with a long tail and big body, making them less likely to be snake food.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“When a child who has pinworms scratches his or her bottom, the eggs get lodged underneath his or her fingernails. Without serious scrubbing every morning, including underneath fingernails, it’s easy for those eggs to get around. They’re sticky little things and they easily make their way from fingers to everything the child touches—doorknobs, furniture, toys, even food. When other children touch those surfaces, they pick up some eggs. Eventually, those curious fingers make their way into mouths and some eggs are ingested orally, worms hatch in the small intestine, migrate to the large intestine, and begin the cycle again.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“Over a 10-year period following the introduction of the campaign, the rate of SIDS death fell by half. As with any medical innovation, with that success came a rather unforeseen but thankfully somewhat benign complication. Babies who sleep on their backs, while the boney plates that form the back of their skulls are still forming and fusing, become more likely to have slightly misshapen heads. And babies with misshapen heads became far from exceptional: During the years in which back sleeping became the norm, the incidence of such affects quintupled.11”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“Recent scientific sleuthing reported in the prestigious journal Science goes so”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“Now, the thing about celery is that it’s especially good at kicking psoralen production into high gear when it feels under attack. Bruised stalks of celery can have 100 times the amount of psoralen of untouched stalks. Farmers who use synthetic pesticides, while creating a whole host of other problems, are essentially protecting plants from attack. Organic farmers don’t use synthetic pesticides. So that means organic celery farmers are leaving their growing stalks vulnerable to attack by insects and fungi—and when those stalks are inevitably munched on, they respond by producing massive amounts of psoralen. By keeping poison off the plant, the organic celery farmer is all but guaranteeing a biological process that will end with lots of poison in the plant.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“There is no denying the fact that we humans are a voracious bunch of animals. Its almost as if our insatiable appetite is trying to fill a bottom less belly carved out by the past hungers our ancestors experienced. That’s why the most gluttonous survived. We are also a fickle and forgetful species. There’s one thing, though, we’ve never been able to forgive or forget, and that’s hunger. Even if we tried to forget, it wasn’t long before another famine came along to retell a very old story. Which is why we should all be excused for our rapaciousness -its literally been hardwired into our DNA.”
― Sharon Moalem, The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women

“If a newly pregnant mother spends the first weeks of her pregnancy eating a typical junk-food-laden diet, the embryo may receive signals that it’s going to be born into a harsh environment where critical types of food are scarce. Through a combination of epigenetic effects, various genes are turned on and off and the baby is born small, so it needs less food to survive.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“From aardvarks to zebras, most of our mammalian cousins have working copies of the genes that can manufacture vitamin C naturally within their bodies. But humans (along with guinea pigs, of all things) have a genetic inborn error in metabolism, a mutation that renders us incapable of doing the same thing. This makes us completely dependent upon our diets to get our daily supply of vitamin C.”
― Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

“One recent study of rats showed that when pregnant rats were fed a low-protein diet for just the first four days of pregnancy—before the embryo had even implanted in the uterus—their babies were prone to high blood pressure. Experiments with sheep showed similar maternal effects. Pregnant sheep that were underfed during the early days of pregnancy—again, even before the embryo implanted in the mother’s uterus—gave birth to off spring that rapidly developed thickened arteries because their slower metabolisms stored more food as fat.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“A group of researchers recently compared the DNA of a large group of Cohanim to the DNA of a large group of Israelites. the researchers were stunned to discover that—despite being spread across the world—the genetic markers of the Cohanim were so specific that they were all almost certainly descended from just a few male individuals. They came from Africa, from Asia, from Europe—and though their appearance ran the gamut from light-skinned and blue-eyed to dark-skinned and brown-eyed, most of them shared very similar Y chromosome markers. This controversial data even allowed the researchers to estimate when the originators of the Cohanim genes were alive. According to the researchers, that would have been 3,180 years ago, between the exodus from Egypt and the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem—or exactly when Aaron walked the earth.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“The key question for scientists to unravel now is why these transposons get the urge to jump. McClintock believed that the jumps are a genomic response to internal or environmental stress that cells can’t handle under their existing setup. Essentially, a challenge to survival triggers the organism to throw the mutation dice, hoping it will land on a change that will help. That’s what she thought was going on with the corn plants she was studying—too much heat or too little water triggered the corn to gamble its survival on finding a mutation that could help it survive. When that happens, the proofreading mechanism is suppressed and mutations are allowed to blossom. Then natural selection kicks in to select the adaptive mutations over the maladaptive mutations in future generations and presto, evolution!”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“E. coli is a digestive workhorse in humans and can come in many different “flavors” or variants, one of which can’t naturally digest lactose, a sugar derived from milk. Nothing is a bigger threat—or evolutionary pressure—to bacteria than starvation. So Cairns deprived milk-shunning E. coli of any food except lactose. Much more rapidly than chance should have allowed, bacteria developed mutations that allowed them to lose their lactose intolerance. Just as McClintock maintained about her corn plants, Cairns also reported that bacteria appeared to target specific areas of their genome—areas where mutations were most likely to be advantageous. Cairns concluded that the bacteria were “choosing” which mutations to go after and then passing on their acquired ability to digest lactose to successive generations of bacteria. In a statement that amounted to evolutionary heresy, he wrote that E. coli “can choose which mutation they should produce” and may “have a mechanism for the inheritance of acquired characteristics.” He straight-out raised the possibility of inherited acquired traits; he basically used those words. It was like shouting, “Go Sox” at Yankee Stadium during the ninth inning of the seventh game of the playoff s—with Boston leading by a run. Since then, researchers have plunged into their petri dishes in attempts to prove, disprove, or just explain Cairns’s work. A year after Cairns’s report came out, Barry Hall, a scientist at the University of Rochester, suggested that the bacteria’s ability to happen upon a lactose-processing adaptation rapidly was caused by a massive increase in the mutation rate. Hall called this “hypermutation”—sort of like mutation on steroids—and, according to him, it helped the bacteria to produce the mutations they needed to survive about 100 million times faster than the mutations otherwise would have been produced.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“Dense hair on the forearms and legs—the parts of the body usually exposed even with moderate dress—may have been a defense against malaria carried by mosquitoes. With the exception of Africa, where the heat was an evolutionary counterweight to thick body hair, the densest hair is generally found in the same places where malaria is most common—the eastern Mediterranean basin, southern Italy, Greece, and Turkey.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“the notion that T. gondii may trigger schizophrenia is supported by recent studies demonstrating that mice that have toxoplasmosis modify their behavior when given antipsychotic medication. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University are now testing whether schizophrenics might be helped with antibiotics that fight toxoplasmosis.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

“A doctor named John Murray was working with his wife in a Somali refugee camp when he noticed that many of the nomads, despite pervasive anemia and repeated exposure to a range of virulent pathogens, including malaria, tuberculosis, and brucellosis, were free of visible infection. He responded to this anomaly by deciding to treat only part of the population with iron at first. Sure enough, he treated some of the nomads for anemia by giving them iron supplements, and suddenly the infections gained the upper hand. The rate of infection in nomads receiving the extra iron skyrocketed. The Somali nomads weren’t withstanding these infections despite their anemia: they were withstanding these infections because of their anemia. It was iron locking in high gear.”
― Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease