Quotes by Biochemists - Page 2

I grow grandiose, which is a good sign I should become prosaic.
Isaac Asimov
I must admit that when I chose the name, 'vitamine,' I was well aware that these substances might later prove not to be of an amine nature. However, it was necessary for me to choose a name that would sound well and serve as a catchword, since I had already at that time no doubt about the importance and the future popularity of the new field.
Casimir Funk
It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?
Isaac Asimov
For a wise man, I have been told, once said, ‘Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate in empty phrases.’ But alas, my lady, I am but a mass of empty phrases, it would seem.
Isaac Asimov
I might paraphrase Churchill and say: never have I received so much for so little.[Exemplifying humility, upon accepting the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.]
Luis Federico Leloir
The point I want to make about methanogens is that they were the losers in the race through a bottleneck, yet nonetheless survived in niche environments. Similarly, on a larger scale, it is rare for the loser to disappear completely, or for the latecomers never to gain at least a precarious foothold. The fact that flight had already evolved among birds did not preclude its later evolution in bats, which became the most numerous mammalian species. The evolution of plants did not lead to the disappearance of algae, or indeed the evolution of vascular plants to the disappearance of mosses.
Nick Lane
Nothing is more conservative than a bacterium.
Nick Lane
The myosin in our own skeletal muscles is more closely related to the myosin driving the flight muscles of that irritating housefly buzzing around your head than it is to the myosin in the muscles of your own sphincters
Nick Lane
We should not be too quick to dismiss our own [ocular] arrangement. As so often in biology, the situation is more complex.....we have the advantage that our own light-sensitive cells are embedded directly in their support cells (the retinal pigment epithelium) with an excellent blood supply immediately underneath. Such an arrangement supports the continuous turnover of photosensitive pigments. The human retina consumes even more oxygen than the brain, per gram, making it the most energetic organ in the body.
Nick Lane
The story of evolution is more dramatic, more compelling, more intricate than any creation myth. Yet like any creation myth, it is a tale of transformations, of sudden and spectacular changes, eruptions of innovation that transfigured our planet, overwriting past revolutions with new layers of complexity. The tranquil beauty of our planet from space belies the real history of this place, full of strife and ingenuity and change. How ironic that our own petty squabbles reflect our planet's turbulent past, and that we alone, despoilers of the Earth, can rise above it to see the beautiful unity of the whole.
Nick Lane
The shrimp's protein and ours are not exactly the same, but they're sosimilar that if you turned up in court and tried to convince a judge that yourversion was not a badly concealed plagiarism, you'd be very unlikely to win.In fact, you'd be a laughing stock, for rhodopsin is not restricted to vent shrimpand humans but is omnipresent throughout the animal kingdom.... Trying to persuade a judge that your rhodopsin is not plagiarisedwould be like trying to clajm that your television set is fundamentally differentfrom everyone else's, just because it's bigger or has a flat screen.
Nick Lane
have no doubt, this technology will — someday, somewhere — be used to change the genome of our own species in ways that are heritable, forever altering the genetic composition of human kind.
Jennifer A. Doudna
Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.
Michael Denton
Americans love to hear good things about their bad habits.
T. Colin Campbell
We don't need to know the effects of single agents on health, because this is not the way that nature works. Nutrition has a wholistic effect on health; one that we consistently miss and misinterpret when we focus on isolated nutrients.
T. Colin Campbell
If we limit our sight to individual players, we'll never see the big picture. The issue is a systemic one, maintained by interconnected actors, all acting in their self-interest to further their goals. The trouble is not, or not always, the actors themselves, or their intrinsic motivations. Instead, it's the overarching goal of the entire system that's at fault: corporate profit above public health.
T. Colin Campbell
By now, I hope you recognize this as one more example of the reductionist paradigm at work, even when it's couched in natural and alternative terms. As we saw in chapter ten, one of the major problems with modern medicine is its reliance on isolated, unnatural chemical pharmaceuticals as the primary tool in the war against disease. But the medical profession isn't the only player in the health-care system that has embraced this element of reductionism. The natural health community has also fallen prey to the ideology that chemicals ripped from their natural context are as good as or better than whole foods. Instead of synthesizing the presumed "active ingredients" from medicinal herbs, as done for prescription drugs, supplement manufacturers seek to extract and bottle the active ingredients from foods known or believed to promote good health and healing. And just like prescription drugs, the active agents function imperfectly, incompletely, and unpredictably when divorced from the whole plant food from which they're derived or synthesized.
T. Colin Campbell
The problem is that we are asking the wrong questions - questions based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the wholistic nature of nutrition. We're asking, "How much vitamin C are we getting?" when we should be asking, "What foods should we be eating to support our bodies' ability to maintain health?
T. Colin Campbell
Even rational, data-driven scientists could be sent into prolonged states of hysteria when presented with evidence that their favorite foods might be killing them.
T. Colin Campbell
With industry's sales and marketing machines cloaked in mantles of charitable virtue, no wonder most Americans don't realize that the junk that passes for food is in fact the biggest contributor to our health crisis, and the junk that passes for medicine keeps us just well enough to continue to spend on both the food and the medicine.
T. Colin Campbell
This is also the case with our disease-care system: it focuses on treating symptoms as if they were root causes, and as a result, it tends to choose interventions that completely ignore the true root causes and thus make it highly likely that symptoms will reappear.
T. Colin Campbell
Modern medicine is not scientific, it is full of prejudice, illogic and susceptible to advertising. Doctors are not taught to reason, they are programmed to believe in whatever their medical schools teach them and the leading doctors tell them. Over the past 20 years the drug companies, with their enormous wealth, have taken medicine over and now control its research, what is taught and the information released to the public.
Abram Hoffer
People who don't expect justice don't have to suffer disappointment.
Isaac Asimov
A couple of months ago I had a dream, which I remember with the utmost clarity. (I don't usually remember my dreams.) I dreamed I had died and gone to Heaven. I looked about and knew where I was-green fields, fleecy clouds, perfumed air, and the distant, ravishing sound of the heavenly choir. And there was the recording angel smiling broadly at me in greeting. I said, in wonder, "Is this Heaven?" The recording angel said, "It is." I said (and on waking and remembering, I was proud of my integrity), "But there must be a mistake. I don't belong here. I'm an atheist." "No mistake," said the recording angel. "But as an atheist how can I qualify?" The recording angel said sternly, "We decide who qualifies. Not you." "I see," I said. I looked about, pondered for a moment, then turned to the recording angel and asked, "Is there a typewriter here that I can use?" The significance of the dream was clear to me. I felt Heaven to be the act of writing, and I have been in Heaven for over half a century and I have always known this.
Isaac Asimov
I think only an idiot can be an atheist. We must admit that there exists an incomprehensible power or force with limitless foresight and knowledge that started the whole universe going in the first place.
Christian B. Anfinsen
If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
Isaac Asimov
Scientist are human. Unraveling the knots of Nature's mysteries is a reward in itself; but even so, scientists like to hear the applause of the audience
Isaac Asimov
The day of the week on which the tour took place was known to all workers. All devices in its path ought to have been carefully neutralized or locked, since it was unreasonable to expect human beings to withstand the temptation to handle knobs, keys, handles and pushbuttons.
Isaac Asimov
It is a mistake,” he said, “to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort.
Isaac Asimov
Imagine that. Terrible, terrible, the way we have all bent to the yoke; the affection we have for the harness about us.
Isaac Asimov
Isn't it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us - and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run.
Isaac Asimov
To [the government] it didn't matter what happened to the American people as long as america in the abstract was kept strong.
Isaac Asimov
Weak emperors mean strong viceroys.
Isaac Asimov
A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.
Albert Szent-Györgyi
It will all stop someday, but not for billions of years. Many billions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must increase.
Isaac Asimov
The stars, like dust, encircle meIn living mists of light;And all of space I seem to seeIn one vast burst of sight
Isaac Asimov
Bible: Various portions of it, when properly interpreted, contain a code of behaviour which many men consider best suited to the ultimate happiness of mankind.
Isaac Asimov
Now, evolution is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links not seen.
Duane T. Gish
I have heard one doctor call high-protein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets “make-yourself-sick” diets, and I think that’s an appropriate moniker. You can also lose weight by undergoing chemotherapy or starting a heroin addiction, but I wouldn’t recommend those, either.
T. Colin Campbell
Advocacy of leaf protein as a human food is based on the undisputed fact that forage crops (such as lucerne) give a greater yield of protein than other types of crops. Even with conventional food crops there is more protein in the leafy parts than in the seeds or tubs that are usually harvested.
Norman Pirie
Why do you think it is stupid to go to windows instead of to doors?”“Because you advertise what you’re trying to hide, silly. If I have a secret, I don’t put tape over my mouth and let everyone know I have a secret. I talk just as much as usual, only about something else. Didn’t you ever read any of the sayings of Salvor Hardin? He was our first Mayor, you know.”“Yes, I know.”“Well, he used to say that only a lie that wasn’t ashamed of itself could possibly succeed. He also said that nothing had to be true, but everything had to sound true. Well, when you come in through a window, it’s a lie that’s ashamed of itself and it doesn’t sound true.”“Then what would you have done?”“If I had wanted to see my father on top secret business, I would have made his acquaintance openly and seen him about all sorts of strictly legitimate things. And then when everyone knew all about you and connected you with my father as a matter of course, you could be as top secret as you wanted and nobody would ever think of questioning it.
Isaac Asimov
There's probably no one so easily bribed, but he lacks even the fundamental honesty of honorable corruption. He doesn't stay bribed; not for any sum.
Isaac Asimov
To insult someone we call him 'bestial'. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.
Isaac Asimov
Goodbye, Hari, my love. Remember always--all you did for me.”            -I did nothing for you.”            -You loved me and your love made me--human.
Isaac Asimov
Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.
Ernst Boris Chain
The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power, it is termed a hunch, or insight, or intuition.
Isaac Asimov
How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself?
Isaac Asimov
Even at the time, [he] felt his anger to be out of proportion to the cause, but it represented an accumulation of resentment.
Isaac Asimov
I tell you it's deadly when you start thinking your wife might be right.
Isaac Asimov
And Elvex said, "I was the man." - In "Robot dreams" (Short story)
Isaac Asimov
Where is the world whose people don't prefer a comfortable, warm, and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty?
Isaac Asimov
She's qualified all right. She understands robots like a sister—comes from hating human beings so much, I think.
Isaac Asimov
In the empty expanses of space, the wandering traders need men like myself to care for the spiritual side of a life so given over to commerce, and worldly pursuits.
Isaac Asimov
Mr Baley", said Quemot, "you can't treat human emotions as though they were built about a positronic brain"."I'm not saying you can. Robotics is a deductive science and sociology an inductive one. But mathematics can be made to apply in either case.
Isaac Asimov
Some readers may realize that this story, first published in 1956, has been overtaken by events. In 1965, astronomers discovered that Mercury does not keep one side always to the Sun, but has a period of rotation of about fifty-four days, so that all parts of it are exposed to the sunlight at one time or another.Well, what can I do except say that I wish astronomers would get things right to begin with?And I certainly refuse to change the story to suit their whims.
Isaac Asimov
...Changelessness is decay.""A paradox. There is no decay without a change for the worse.""Changelessness is a change for the worse...
Isaac Asimov
Good,” said the First Speaker. “And tell me, what do you think of all this. A finished work of art, is it not?”“Definitely!”“Wrong! It is not.” This, with sharpness. “It is the first lesson you must unlearn. The Seldon Plan is neither complete nor correct. Instead, it is merely the best that could be done at the time. Over a dozen generations of men have pored over these equations, worked at them, taken them apart to the last decimal place, and put them together again. They’ve done more than that. They’ve watched nearly four hundred years pass and against the predictions and equations, they’ve checked reality, and they have learned.
Isaac Asimov
He slept that night the sleep of a successfully stubborn man.
Isaac Asimov
And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile — except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison.
Isaac Asimov
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction -- its essence -- has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.
Isaac Asimov