c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity in the opening weeks of the 20th century sparked a scientific quest to understand the nature and content of genetic information that has propelled biology for the last hundred years. The scientific progress made [since that time] falls naturally into four main phases, corresponding roughly to the four quarters of the century.""The first established the cellular basis of heredity: the chromosomes. The second defined the molecular basis of heredity: the DNA double helix. The third unlocked the informational basis of heredity [i.e. the genetic code], with the discovery of the biological mechanism by which cells read the information contained in genes, and with the invention of the recombinant DNA technologies of cloning and sequencing by which scientists can do the same." The sequence of the human genome, the project asserted, marked the starting point of the "fourth phase" of genetics. This was the era of "genomics" - the assessment of the entire genomes of organisms, including humans. There is an old conundrum in philosophy that asks if an intelligent machine can ever decipher its own instruction manual. For humans, the manual was now complete. Deciphering it, reading it, and understanding it would be quite another matter.
— Siddharta Mukherjee
The taxi driver is someone who spends all day driving in city traffic (an activity that provokes either heart attack or delirium), in constant conflict with other human drivers. Consequently, he is nervous and hates every anthropomorphic creature.
— Umberto Eco, How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays
It was a fungal party hellscape.
— Robin Sloan, Sourdough
... despite the profound advances in molecular biology oer the past half-century, we still do not understand what life is, how it relates to the inanimate world, and how it emerged.
— Addy Pross, What is Life?: How chemistry becomes biology
What is even more astonishing is that the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you are.
— Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
in 2011, Rachel and I founded a company called Caribou Biosciences to commercialize the Cas proteins.
— Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
Editas Medicine has an exclusive multimillion-dollar license with Juno Therapeutics to develop T cell therapies
— Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
PGD has also been used for other controversial purposes, such as the birth if so-called savior siblings, destined from the moment of implantation not only to live their own lives, but also to serve as organ or cell donors for a sibling.
— Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
All unnatural control systems have a key element in their intricate composition – the fatality that they will naturally collapse.
— Robert Neil Fleischer, Alien Biography
Humans want answers, answers that compute; this does not compute Will Robinson! This was dialogue between a young boy and a robot from a TV series in the late 1960s. This TV series was a precursor for the new technology humans were about to be introduced to in the late twentieth century.
— Nicholas M. Cuono Sr., This Is His House and These Are His Rules
In relation to law I am doubtful whether, even at the present time, science has fairly begun.
— H.G.Wells
In his fight against the powers of the surrounding world his first weapon was magic, the first forerunner of our modern technology. We suppose that this confidence in magic is derived from the over-estimation of the individual’s own intellectual operations, from the belief in the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, which, incidentally, we come across again in our obsessional neurotics.
— Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Morality established from Science is the key to understanding Coexistence.Science based on Morality is the reason we have prejudice for things we don't understand.
— Anonymous
Nothing will stop us from stealing our place in the sun. - The Founder from Lost in Atlantis
— Briton Heitt, Lost in Atlantis
Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought.
— Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
we founded Editas Medicine with $43 million in financing from three venture capital firms.
— Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
We move through this world on paths laid down long before we are born.
— Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration
One way to express the answer is that it might happen by 'chance'. But 'chance' is just a word expressing ignorance. It means 'determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means'.
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
If you've never done anything wrong it's probably because you have never tried anything new.
— Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
Can a broken cistern hold water?
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Emergent behaviors rely on computational geometry and scale.
— R.A.Delmonico
As soon as you say, 'I'm going to use the legal system to impose my will on you,' you're buying into a lie,' schlichtmann said. 'You'll get chaos, and the system will dissapoint you. You'll get decision-making that only makes sense in Bedlam. We think the legal system is there for us, but it's not. It's there only for itself.
— Dan Fagin, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
But in the cause of science men are expected to suffer.
— Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
See, those who wield the primordial forces of creation have a long-running grudge with physics.
— Jim Butcher, Blood Rites
The splendor of God's work is the beauty of stars.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
In the end, what I've learned is that when it comes to this type of science, you really can't be arrogant and assume you know the answers. Arrogance by these companies and by the government is what got us into all this in the first place.
— Dan Fagin, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
— Mahatma Gandhi
I gazed at these marvels in profound silence. Words were utterly wanting to indicate the sensations of wonder I experienced. I seemed, as I stood upon that mysterious shore, as if I were some wandering inhabitant of a distant planet, present for the first time at the spectacle of some terrestrial phenomena belonging to another existence. To give body and existence to such new sensations would have required the coinage of new words - and here my feeble brain found itself wholly at fault. I looked on, I thought, I reflected, I admired, in a state of stupefaction not altogether unmingled with fear!
— Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
Science, great, mighty and in the end unerring, science has fallen into many errors - errors which have been fortunate and useful rather than otherwise, for they have been the steppingstones to truth.
— Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
And when you lay in bed with your wife,are you mentally there or with the women on TV? Or the women who you've been intimate with though the screens? You not only compare your wife to these women but also love her as though she was someone elsePhysically present when making love to her but mentally absent from herYou kiss her lips while your heart kisses the "screen woman
— Amby C. Ezem
The problem with all fields of research is that people are impatient. It a particular line of enquiry seems to be making progress, we continue down the line, but if it seems to be getting nowhere, we abandon it. This is a problem because the route to the future is often tortuous. Things seems to be moving towards the goal but then unexpectedly snake off in the wrong direction. Initially unproductive approaches can often turn out to be the only ones that lead to the desired destination.
— Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It
Maybe if you had megaphones on your chest they'd listen to the words that came out of your lips
— Amby C. Ezem
The mind you use to try to see your true self does not recognise if it has never seen. Once you stop looking within and realise you are the one doing the looking to recognise yourself, the mind will understand.
— Dee-Anne Hayes, Simultaneous Minds: Reinventing Yourself for Globalisation Change to Achieve Enlightenment of Purpose
Mother Nature continues in motion while your mind is segmented with probabilities. Remembering your night dreams shows exactly this - fleeting scenes of experience with nothing in between. Dee-anne Hayes
— Dee-Anne Hayes, Simultaneous Minds: Reinventing Yourself for Globalisation Change to Achieve Enlightenment of Purpose
It is possible to be too stable. No Outer World has colonized a new planet in two and a half centuries.. are lives too long to risk and too comfortable to upset.“I don’t know about that, Dr. Fastolfe. You’ve come to Earth. You risk disease.”“Yes, I do. There are some of us, Mr. Baley, who feel that the future of the human race is even worth the possible loss of an extended lifetime. Too few of us, I am sorry to say.”“In trying to introduce robots here on Earth, we’re doing our best to upset the balance of your City economy.”“You mean you’re creating a growing group of displaced and declassified men on purpose?”“Not out of cruelty or callousness, believe me. A group of displaced men, as you call them, are what we need to serve as a nucleus for colonization. Your ancient America was discovered by ships fitted out with men from the prisons. Don’t you see that the City’s womb has failed the displaced man. He has nothing to lose and worlds to gain by leaving Earth.
— Isaac Asimov
The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there, And warmly debated the matter; The Orthodox said that it came from the air, And the Heretics said from the platter. They argued it long and they argued it strong, And I hear they are arguing now; But of all the choice spirits who lived in the cheese, Not one of them thought of a cow.
— Arthur Conan Doyle
When I used to come home from school Mother used to ask me what happened that day, and I’d tell her,” said Miss Pefko. “Now I come home from work and she asks me the same question, and all I can say is—” Miss Pefko shook her head and let her crimson lips flap slackly— “I dunno, I dunno, I dunno.”“If there’s something you don’t understand,” urged Dr. Breed, “ask Dr. Horvath to explain it. He’s very good at explaining.” He turned to me. “Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.”“Then I’m dumber than an eight-year-old,” Miss Pefko mourned. “I don’t even know what a charlatan is.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle/God Bless You Mr. Rosewater/Breakfast of Champions
Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up – the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm’s length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains.Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of Lawrence’s poems and novels) ceases to be himself and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe.And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point. In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely. Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of ‘mere things,’ when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves. Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the nonhuman world of the near-point is rendered in patterns. These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers – the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus – and are elaborated, with recurrences and variations, into something transportingly reminisce
— Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity onearth.
— Richard Preston, The Demon in the Freezer
Indeed neither life nor science bothers about "essences"-they leave "essences" to metaphysics, which is neither life nor science.
— Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity
Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
— Rollo May, The Discovery of Being
In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is concern for content.
— Noam Chomsky
In our adventures, we have only seen our monsters more clearly and described his scales and fangs in new ways - ways that reveal a cancer cell to be. like Grendel, a distorted version of ourselves." -1989 Nobel Prize Speech, Cited in Siddhartha Mukherjee's Emperor of All Maladies
— Harold Varmus
The atoms of our body, as well, flow in and away from us. We, like waves and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous
— Carlo Rovelli, La realtà non è come ci appare: La struttura elementare delle cose
Advances in technology can be empowering, progressive and enriching. History has shown this across civilisations and societies. But it has also shown, and the present and future will continue to show, that it is foolish, risky, flawed and folly without us raising our individual and collective consciousness and mindfulness to accompany it - to ensure we use it shrewdly, kindly and wisely.
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
Stone is a primal matter, inhuman in its duration. Yet despite its incalculable temporality, the lithic is not some vast and alien outside. A limit-breaching intimacy persistently unfolds. Hurl a rock and you'll shatter an ontology, leave taxonomy in glistening shards.
— Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone
In 1988, a cave explorer named Véronique Le Guen volunteered for an extreme experiment: to live alone in an underground cavern in southern France without a clock for one hundred and eleven days, monitored by scientists who wished to study the human body's natural rhythms in the absence of time cues. For a while, she settled into a pattern of thirty hours awake and twenty hours asleep. She described herself as being "psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values are or what is my purpose in life."When she returned to society, her husband later noted, she seemed to have an emptiness inside her that she was unable to fully express. "While I was alone in my cave I was my own judge," she said. "You are your own most severe judge. You must never lie or all is lost. The strongest sentiment I brought out of the cave is that in my life I will never tolerate lying." A little more than a year later, Le Guen swallowed an overdose of barbiturates and lay down in her car in Paris, a suicide at age thirty-three.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
Turns out even NASA can't improve on duct tape.
— Andy Weir, The Martian
When power is discovered, man always turns to it," Bateson wrote darkly. "The science of heredity will soon provide power on stupendous scale; and in some country, at some time not, perhaps, far distant, that power will be applied to control the composition of a nation. Whether the institution of such control will ultimately be good or bad for that nation, or humanity at large, is a separate question." He had preempted the century of the gene.
— Siddharta Mukherjee
Phenotype, in short, drags genotypes behind it, like a cart pulling a horse. It is the perennial conundrum of natural selection that it seeks one thing (fitness) and accidentally finds another (genes that produce fitness). Genes that produce fitness become gradually over-represented in populations through the selection phenotypes, thereby allowing organisms to become more and more adapted to their environments. There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirsty matching of an organism to its environment. That is the engine that drives evolution.
— Siddharta Mukherjee
This was the missing link in Darwin's Logic: reproductive incompatibility, ultimately derived from genetic incompatibility, drove the origin of novel species.
— Siddharta Mukherjee
Muller was catapulted into the international fame by his discovery. The effect of radiation on the mutation rate in flies had two immediate implications. First, genes had to be made of matter. Radiation, after all, is merely energy. Frederick Griffith had made genes move between organisms. Muller had altered genes using energy. A gene, whatever it was, was capable of motion, transmission, and of energy-induced change properties generally associated with chemical matter.
— Siddharta Mukherjee
Without equality, he argued, eugenics would degenerate into yet another mechanism by which the powerful could control the weak.
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History
The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.
— Lawrence M. Krauss
It isn't creativity that fades, but stamina: science is an endurance sport
— Siddharta Mukherjee
Gene, protein, function, and fate were strung in a chain: one chemical alteration in one base pair in DNA was sufficient to "encode" a radical change in human fate.
— Siddharta Mukherjee
If you formulate your question properly, mathematics gives you the answer
— Savas Dimopoulos
Those ignorant "masters of our destinies" who regard humans as animals or as monstrous hybrids of natural and supernatural must be dethroned by scientific education.Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think!
— Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity
Philosophy, as defined by Fichte, is the "science of sciences." Its aim was to solve the problems of the world. In the past, when all exact sciences were in their infancy, philosophy had to be purely speculative, with little or no regard to realities. But if we regard philosophy as a Mother science, divided into many branches, we find that those branches have grown so large and various, that the Mother science looks like a hen with her little ducklings paddling in a pond, far beyond her reach; she is unable to follow her growing hatchlings. In the meantime, the progress of life and science goes on, irrespective of the cackling of metaphysics. Philosophy does not fulfill her initial aim to bring the results of experimental and exact sciences together and to solve world problems. Through endless, scientific specialization scientific branches multiply, and for want of coordination the great world-problems suffer. This failure of philosophy to fulfill her boasted mission of scientific coordination is responsible for the chaos in the world of general thought. The world has no collective or organized higher ideals and aims, nor even fixed general purposes. Life is an accidental game of private or collective ambitions and greeds.
— Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity
Not all social animals are social with the same degree of commitment. In some species, the members are so tied to each other and interdependent as to seem the loosely conjoined cells of a tissue. The social insects are like this; they move, and live all their lives, in a mass; a beehive is a spherical animal. In other species, less compulsively social, the members make their homes together, pool resources, travel in packs or schools, and share the food, but any single one can survive solitary, detached from the rest. Others are social only in the sense of being more or less congenial, meeting from time to time in committees, using social gatherings as ad hoc occasions for feeding and breeding. Some animals simply nod at each other in passing, never reaching even a first-name relationship.
— Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
Intelligent Design is fraught with even more difficulties, as it suggests God as one who dips His hand in every now and then to bring about the first microbial life, to bring about new forms during the Cambrian explosion, and to finally create humans after 4.55 billion years of earth, while He was doing... what exactly? According to Intelligent Design advocates, God tinkers with animal life every once in a few hundred million years or so, for reasons never made explicitly clear.
— Aaron R. Yilmaz, Deliver Us From Evolution?: A Christian Biologist's In-Depth Look at the Evidence Reveals a Surprising Harmony Between Science and God
Hoh, Boy!" Freddy snorted, slapping his palm to his forehead. "I hope you never donate your brain to science. It would set civilization back fifty years.
— Bertrand R. Brinley, The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club
There are many things in science that were developed because it was possible rather than desirable. Humanity's curiosity will almost certainly be its downfall.
— Tony Moyle, The Limpet Syndrome
What sort of person experimentally infests a child with maggots? A confident sort, certainly. A maverick. Someone comfortable with the unpretty facts of biology. Someone who is perhaps himself an unpretty fact of biology.
— Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
Dogmatic theology is, by its very nature, unchangeable. The same can be said in regard to the spirit of the law. Law was and is to protect the past and present status of society and, by its very essence, must be very conservative, if not reactionary. Theology and law are both of them static by their nature.Philosophy, law and ethics, to be effective in a dynamic world must be dynamic; they must be made vital enough to keep pace with the progress of life and science. In recent civilization ethics, because controlled by theology and law, which are static, could not duly influence the dynamic, revolutionary progress of technic and the steadily changing conditions of life; and so we witness a tremendous downfall of morals in politics and business. Life progresses faster than our ideas, and so medieval ideas, methods and judgments are constantly applied to the conditions and problems of modern life. This discrepancy between facts and ideas is greatly responsible for the dividing of modern society into different warring classes, which do not understand each other. Medieval legalism and medieval morals- the basis of the old social structure-being by their nature conservative, reactionary, opposed to change, and thus becoming more and more unable to support the mighty social burden of the modern world, must be adjudged responsible in a large measure for the circumstances which made the World War inevitable.
— Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity
From an illustration in her "Animals of a Bygone Era": a Leptictidium, an extinct rabbit-like animal who left no descendants, says: "Too bad, because we were really cute.
— Maja Säfström
[Hegel’s] system of nature seemed, at least to natural philosophers, absolutely crazy….Hegel…launched out with particular vehemence and acrimony against the natural philosophers, and especially against Isaac Newton. The philosophers accused the scientific men of narrowness; the scientific men retorted that the philosophers were insane.
— Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays
The individual parts played by other instrumentalists-- crickets or earthworms, for instance-- may not have the sound of music by themselves, but we hear them out of context. If we could listen to them all at once, fully orchestrated, in their immense ensemble, we might become aware of the counterpoint, the balance of tones and timbres and harmonics, the sonorities. The recorded songs of the humpback whale, filled with tensions and resolutions, ambiguities and allusions, incomplete, can be listened to as a a part of music, like an isolated section of an orchestra. If we had better hearing, we could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonies of midges hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.
— Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
Working on a typewriter by touch, like riding a bicycle or strolling on a path, is best done by not giving it a glancing thought. Once you do, your fingers fumble and hit the wrong keys. To do things involving practiced skills, you need to turn loose the systems of muscles and nerves responsible for each maneuver, place them on their own, and stay out of it. There is no real loss of authority in this, since you get to decide whether to do the thing or not, and you can intervene and embellish the technique any time you like; if you want to ride a bicycle backward, or walk with an eccentric loping gait giving a little skip every fourth step, whistling at the same time, you can do that. But if you concentrate your attention on the details, keeping in touch with each muscle, thrusting yourself into a free fall with each step and catching yourself at the last moment by sticking out the other foot in time to break the fall, you will end up immobilized, vibrating with fatigue. It is a blessing to have options for choice and change in the learning of such unconsciously coordinated acts. If we were born with all these knacks inbuilt, automated like ants, we would surely miss the variety. It would be a less interesting world if we all walked and skipped alike, and never fell from bicycles. If we were all genetically programmed to play the piano deftly from birth, we might never learn to understand music.
— Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
When God communed with these ancient writers, He did not inform them that the seat of emotion is actually the brain rather than the innards. God is infinitely wise, and His reasons for not correcting the ancients' physiological knowledge can only be speculated upon. One may postulate that to revise the ancients' entire understanding of science was superfluous to the purpose and message God had for these people. God did not feel the need to update their scientific knowledge—perhaps because God felt no need to do so, or perhaps to do so would have bewildered them and made them suspicious of this God who knew nothing of their 'correct' science.
— Aaron R. Yilmaz, Deliver Us From Evolution?: A Christian Biologist's In-Depth Look at the Evidence Reveals a Surprising Harmony Between Science and God
It is not a simple thing to decide where we fit, for at one time or another in our lives we manage to organize in every imaginable social arrangement...We have names to label each as self, and we believe without reservation that this system of taxonomy will guarantee the entity, the absolute separateness in each of us, but the mechanism has no discernible function in the center of a crowded city; we are essentially nameless, most of our time.
— Lewis Thomas
Perhaps it is in this respect that language differs most sharply from other biologic systems for communication. Ambiguity seems to be an essential, indispensable element for the transfer of information from one place to another by words, where matters of real importance are concerned. It is often necessary, for meaning to come through, that there be an almost vague sense of strangeness and askewness. Speechless animals and cells cannot do this. The specifically locked-on antigen at the surface of a lymphocyte does not send the cell off in search of something totally different; when a bee is tracking sugar by polarized light, observing the sun as though consulting his watch, he does not veer away to discover an unimaginable marvel of a flower. Only the human mind is designed to work in this way, programmed to drift away in the presence of locked-on information, straying from each point in a hunt for a better, different point.If it were not for the capacity for ambiguity, for the sensing of strangeness, the words in all languages provide, we would have no way of recognizing the layers of counterpoint in meaning, and we might be spending all our time sitting on stone fences, staring into the sun. To be sure, we would always have had some everyday use to make of the alphabet, and we might have reached the same capacity for small talk, but it is unlikely that we would have been able to evolve from words to Bach. The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.
— Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
It is in our collective behavior that we are the most mysterious. We won't be able to construct machines like ourselves until we've understood this, and we're not even close. All we know is the phenomenon: we spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function; it is what we do with our lives. By the time we reach the end, each of us has taken in a staggering store, enough to exhaust any computer, much of it incomprehensible, and we generally manage to put out even more than we take in. Information is our source of energy; we are driven by it. It has become a tremendous enterprise, a kind of energy system on its own. All 3 billion of us are being connected by telephones, radios, television sets, airplanes, satellites, harangues on public-address systems, newspapers, magazines, leaflets dropped from great heights, words got in edgewise. We are becoming a grid, a circuitry around the earth.
— Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
However, I have a stronger hunch that the greatest part of the important biomedical research waiting to be done is in the class of basic science. There is an abundance of interesting fact relating to all our major diseases, and more items of information are coming in steadily from all quarters in biology. The new mass of knowledge is still formless, in complete, lacking the essential threads of connection, displaying misleading signals at every turn, riddled with blind alleys. There are fascinating ideas all over the place, irresistible experiments beyond numbering, all sorts of new ways into the maze of problems. But every next move is unpredictable, every outcome uncertain. It is a puzzling time, but a very good time. I do not know how you lay out orderly plans for this kind of activity, but I suppose you could find out by looking through the disorderly records of the past hundred years. Somehow, the atmosphere has to be set so that a disquieting sense of being wrong is the normal attitude of the investigators. It has to be taken for granted that the only way in is by riding the unencumbered human imagination, with the special rigor required for recognizing that something can be highly improbable, maybe almost impossible, and at the same time true.Locally, a good way to tell how the work is going is to listen in the corridors. If you hear the word, "Impossible!" spoken as an expletive, followed by laughter, you will know that someone's orderly research plan is coming along nicely.
— Lewis Thomas
Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.Even more astounding is our statistical improbability in physical terms. The normal, predictable state of matter throughout the universe is randomness, a relaxed sort of equilibrium, with atoms and their particles scattered around in an amorphous muddle. We, in brilliant contrast, are completely organized structures, squirming with information at every covalent bond. We make our living by catching electrons at the moment of their excitement by solar photons, swiping the energy released at the instant of each jump and storing it up in intricate loops fro ourselves. We violate probability, by our nature. To be able to do this systematically, and in such wild varieties of form, from viruses to whales, is extremely unlikely; to have sustained the effort successfully for the several billion years of our existence, without drifting back into randomness, was nearly a mathematical impossibility. Add to this the biological improbability that makes each member of our own species unique. Everyone is one in 3 billion at the moment, which describes the odds. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surfaces of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing.
— Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
It is hard to feel affection for something as totally impersonal as the atmosphere, and yet there it is, as much a part and product of life as wine and bread. Taken all in al, the sky is a miraculous achievement. It works, and for what it is designed to accomplish it is as infallible as anything in nature. I doubt whether any of us could think of a way to improve on it, beyond maybe shifting a local cloud from here to there on occasion. The word 'chance' does not serve to account well for structures of such magnificence...We should credit it for what it is: for sheer size and perfection of function, it is far and away the grandest product of collaboration in all of nature.It breathes for us, and it does another thing for our pleasure. Each day, millions of meteorites fall against the outer limits of the membrane and are burned to nothing by the friction. Without this shelter, our surface would long since have become the pounded powder of the moon. Even though our receptors are not sensitive enough to hear it, there is comfort in knowing the sound is there overhead, like the random noise of rain on the roof at night.
— Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
I am a monk at heart - a scientist at brain - a philosopher at conscience.
— Abhijit Naskar, I Am The Thread: My Mission
The key to our scientific future,....is hidden in our past
— Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
Was intelligence an inevitability, a consequence of evolution? Bacteria succeeded without a brain, possessing survival skills that rivaled their biological hosts. So why should a creature of higher intelligence expect to do better? Humans were on the verge of being replaced by their hybrid creations. How intelligent was that?
— Todd Crawshaw, Exploits of the Satyr
Let me summarise our delicate position in this universe: Our every word can be our last word; our every look can be our last look! Our every moment can be our last moment! Are we happy about this fragile situation? No! Are we going to deceive ourselves with some childish stories, in other words with religion? No! Then what are we going to do? We will change this desperate situation, we will strike this chaotic universe with human mind, with high intelligence, in short with science! Humanity’s ultimate objective is to reshape this dangerous universe so that no threat will ever remain for our existence!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
And we're not lost."We are so fucking lost. Literally adrift in the nothing space between universes.
— Blake Crouch, Dark Matter
You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.
— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals--and how few they are--gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies.
— H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Jemma Simmons- I like to think about the first law of thermodynamics, that no energy in the universe is created...Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz- And none is destroyedJemma Simmons- That means that every bit of energy inside us, every particle, will go on to be a part of something else. Maybe live as a dragonfish, a microbe, maybe burn in a supernova ten billion years from now. And every part of us now was once a part of some other thing- a moon, a storm cloud, a mammoth.Leo Fitz- A monkey.Jemma Simmons- A monkey. Thousands and thousands of other beautiful things that were just as terrified to die as we are. We gave them new life. Good one, I hope.
— Jed Whedon
Often known science will revolt against unknown science
— tirumala
The sap is nourish from the root.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The branches do not support the root. But the root supports the branches.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Science is based not on faith but in skeptism
— Brinton, Crane
The Lord God give rain to the earth.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Caitlyn Jenner is not brave nor a hero
— Kyle Broflovski
Perhaps you'll gave to kiss him again, if you're not sure. Gather more evidence. In the name of science.
— Rhiannon Thomas, Long May She Reign
Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did.
— Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Everything is more whole in the end when you forgo destruction and instead repair, he reasoned. But some things can’t be repaired. His arm can’t be repaired. He will always be broken because of me.
— Megan Tennant, Aletheia
If our 14 billion year cosmic history were scaled to 1 year, then 100,000 years of human history would be 4 minutes, and a 100 year life would be 0.2 seconds.
— Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality
I was far from being a child prodigy, and yet I learnt relativity at the age of 15!
— Ray d'Inverno
Only the Creator defines path of a river course.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Many sheep but one Shepherd.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
When we think of social animals-that is, animals who live together in well-defined groups, and form enduring relationships- we usually think of the great apes, of wolves and other members of the dog family, and, or course, of humans. Science considers bears to be solitary animals. But while bears don't live in established groups or obey rigid hierarchies as chimps and wolves do, they have amazingly complex social relationships.
— Benjamin Kilham, In the Company of Bears: What Black Bears Have Taught Me about Intelligence and Intuition
Bears, it turns out, are a lot like humans. They form alliances with strangers, they make calculations about relative costs and benefits, they lay down rules and punish those who break them. They trade based on a clear system of reciprocity. They communicate using equal parts emotion, intention, and dependence on context-a combination that is essential for communication between strangers and in fact forms the basis for language.
— Benjamin Kilham, In the Company of Bears: What Black Bears Have Taught Me about Intelligence and Intuition
Aggression in bears can be and often is a stepping stone to friendship. Friendship and alliances frequently develop by repeated interactions, with initial aggression that lessens over time.
— Benjamin Kilham, In the Company of Bears: What Black Bears Have Taught Me about Intelligence and Intuition
Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes.... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
If the spirit of your imagination is limited, your journey of discovery will be very short.
— Alastair Agutter, The Theory of Particle Matter Frequencies and Multiple Universes
The human condition to ignore or dispel ideas is an admission of fear by oneself and refusing to seek out the phenomena of the unknown, to complete the cycle of understanding through greater knowledge and enlightenment.
— Alastair Agutter, The Theory of Particle Matter Frequencies and Multiple Universes
An informed world is not only for today, but a legacy to shape a better world and future for tomorrow.
— Alastair Agutter, The Theory of Particle Matter Frequencies and Multiple Universes
In these days, when there is a tendency to specialize so closely, it is well for us to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or even Benjamin Franklin.
— Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy. And if we are a speck in the immensity of space, we also occupy an instant in the expanse of ages.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
If it were said that without such bones and sinews and all the rest of them I should not be able to do what I think is right, it would be true; but to say that it is because of them that I do what I am doing, and not through choice of what is best - although my actions are controlled by Mind - would be a very lax and inaccurate form of expression.
— Socrates, Apology, Crito and Phaedo of Socrates.
I've never understood the phrase they have chemistry before now. After all, everything is chemistry. Everything is combination and reaction. The atoms in by body align themselves with the atoms in his.
— Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star
If you believe you can change—if you make it a habit—the change becomes real. This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be. Once that choice occurs—and becomes automatic—it’s not only real, it starts to seem inevitable.
— Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
It is not merely the feeling that something is familiar. It is one step beyond that. It is something new, challenging, or surprising that opens a door into a feeling of comfort, meaning, or familiarity. It is called an aesthetic aha.
— Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
According to scientists, there are three stages of love: lust, attraction, and attachment. And, it turns out, each of the stages is orchestrated by chemicals—neurotransmitters—in the brain.As you might expect, lust is ruled by testosterone and estrogen.The second stage, attraction, is governed by dopamine and serotonin. When, for example, couples report feeling indescribably happy in each other’s presence, that’s dopamine, the pleasure hormone, doing its work.Taking cocaine fosters the same level of euphoria. In fact, scientists who study both the brains of new lovers and cocaine addicts are hard-pressed to tell the difference.The second chemical of the attraction phase is serotonin. When couples confess that they can’t stop thinking about each other, it’s because their serotonin level has dropped. People in love have the same low serotonin levels as people with OCD. The reason they can’t stop thinking about each other is that they are literally obsessed.Oxytocin and vasopressin control the third stage: attachment or long-term bonding. Oxytocin is released during orgasm and makes you feel closer to the person you’ve had sex with. It’s also released during childbirth and helps bond mother to child. Vasopressin is released postcoitally.Natasha knows these facts cold. Knowing them helped her get over Rob’s betrayal. So she knows: love is just chemicals and coincidence.So why does Daniel feel like something more?
— Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star
Stopping in the 1970s, "Hybridity" as the fifth and final chapter is less of an end point than a certain realization of the artifice, plasticity, and technology that Wells and Loeb envisioned as the future of the human relationship to living matter as well as of the "catastrophic" situation that Georges Canghuilhem (following Kurt Goldstein) saw in life subjected to the milieu of the laboratory.
— Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies
Missing this interview? It's not the end of the world. It is the beginning.
— Erin Fletcher, Tied Up In You
My father learned his disinterest under the guise of masculinity. Boys don’t cry. There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as categories of denial.Science is such a category. The torture and death that Heinrich Himmler found disturbing to witness became acceptable to him when it fell under this rubric. He liked to watch the scientific experiments in the concentration camps
— Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
Science explains the how.Philosophy explains the why.Free-thinkers need both.
— J.Adam Snyder
One of the most curious consequences of quantum physics is that a particle like an electron can seemingly be in more than one place at the same time until it is observed, at which point there seems to be a random choice made about where the particle is really located. Scientists currently believe that this randomness is genuine, not just caused by a lack of information. Repeat the experiment under the same conditions and you may get a different answer each time.
— Marcus du Sautoy, The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science
She laughed. 'See? You can do philosophy!' He rolled his eyes and shook his head. 'Don't insult me.
— Alex Scarrow, The Infinity Cage
Personally I do not agree with sex being brought into science at all. The idea of 'women and science' is entirely irrelevant. Either a woman is a good scientist, or she is not; in any case she should be given opportunities, and her work should be studied from the scientific, not the sex, point of view
— Hertha Ayrton