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Information is crucial to our biological substance - our genetic code is information. But before 1950, it was not obvious that inheritance had anything to do with code. And it was only after the invention of the telegraph that we understood that our nerves carry messages, just like wires.

OUR history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us.

From the beginning, each human embryo has its own unique genetic identity.

The more that I looked at DNA, the more I realized it was nature and nurture. It's how genes and your environment work together to produce the person you are.

We know that genes shape human cultures and human societies: The DNA we inherited from our ancestors makes certain foods taste better, affects the way we care for children, influences what colors we find vibrant, and contributes to our love of socializing, among other examples.

We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.

We are fashioned not by our genes, but by our environment - by the family and socio-historic conditions in which we evolve.

Geneticists in the early 1900s believed that nature - in an effort to avoid wasting precious space within chromosomes - would pack as many genes into each chromosome as possible.

We are all descendants of Adam, and we are all products of racial miscegenation.

My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.