Political Quotes

“I support the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. Medical science has made amazing progress over the past century and a half, and I hope that we can pass this legislation, which will allow our nation to harness the promise of personalized medicine through an understanding of individual genomes, while ensuring that Americans are protected against the misuse of such powerful knowledge. The past 140 years have marked an increasingly frequent series of scientific breakthroughs regarding that intricate and vital component of life called deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. In 1869, Friedrich Miescher found the microscopic substance that would come to be called DNA within the nuclei of cells. In 1952, Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase confirmed that DNA plays a role in heredity. The following year, James Watson and Francis Crick used images produced by Rosalind Franklin to propose what many believe to be the first accurate model of the structure of DNA, the now-familiar double helix. In 1977, Fred Sanger boosted the ``phi X'' bacteriophage into the limelight by making it the first organism to have its genome sequenced.”