“Iceland had an obsession with genealogy, a tradition of centralized medical record keeping, and an altruistic populace. The nation had a massive tissue bank that had been preserving samples from autopsies since 1915, and had recorded every single case of cancer diagnosed since 1952.”
“As for his coveted job at America’s most famous college? “Harvard is a lousy university,” Stefansson said. “It’s a loose confederacy of independent institutions and I was eager to get away from there. It was a boring place.””
“Scientists discovered that most genetic material is passed from each parent to child in a remarkably structured architecture that consists of a predictable number of genes chunked together and kept largely unchanged, in a grouping called a haplotype. These haplotypes were believed to have developed very early in human evolution, which meant there were only a small number of common flavors possibly carried by every single person.”
“If you cannot tell a story with your science, your science isn’t worth a shit.”