Heredity deals the cards; environment plays the hand.

I am the beneficiary of a lucky break in the genetic sweepstakes.

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.

The things you experience," she continued, "are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation. And even if you never lift a shovel or plant a cabbage, every day of your life something is written upon you. And when you die, the entirety of that written record returns to the earth. All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record. Maybe the only things that persist are----copies of things. The original has long since passed away from this universe, but on and on we copy. I have devoted my miniscule life to the act of copying.

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.