Biologist Quotes

There is no phenomenon in a living system that is not molecular, but there is none that is only molecular, either.

Paul Alfred Weiss

Travel is said to be broadening because it makes us realize that our way of doing things is not the only one, that people in other cultures live differently and get by just fine. Insects do that, too, only better.

As I crawled out of the abyss of combat and over the rail of the Sea Runner, I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As Wilfred Owen's poem "Insensibility" puts it so well, those who feel most of others suffer most in war.

I liked to use my face mask more than the diving helmet for most occasions. I was learning to hold my breath longer now and could go down almost as deep without the helmet which limited my movements...

Scientists construct facts by constantly making decisions about what they will consider significant, what experiments they should pursue, and how they will describe their observations.

Without close and reciprocal relationships with other animal beings, we're alienated from the rich, diverse, and magnificent world in which we live.

The Universe is one indivisible, dynamic whole in which energy and matter are so deeply entangled it is impossible to consider them as independent elements.

The spirit of speculation is the same as the spirit of science, namely... a desire to know the causes of things.

Scientific knowledge and understanding is a communal achievement, the sum of a multitude of contributions from many different people. Any individual may feel a certain justifiable pride if he knows that he has added one brick to the structure.

C. H. Waddington

The study of nature is a limitless field, the most fascinating adventure in the world.

Margaret Morse Nice

The modern research laboratory can be a large and complicated social organism.

J. Michael Bishop

The study of how substances alter gene expression is part of the field of epigenetics. Some chemical exposures appear to turn on and turn off genes in ways that disregulate cell growth and predispose for cancer. From this perspective, our genes are less the command-and-control masters of our cells and more like the keys of piano, with the environment as the hands of the pianist.

Sandra Steingraber

The downside of skepticism: it can easily turn into an arrogant position of a priori rejection of any new phenomenon or idea, a position that is as lacking in critical thinking as the one of the true believer, and that simply does not help either science or the public at large.

Massimo Pigliucci

I am drawn to the wild not because it is wild but because it is sensible, logical, ordered, stable, resilient.

When I made the decision to transition, I honestly had no idea what it would be like for me to live as female. The only thing I knew for sure was that pretending to be male was slowly killing me.

The select who engage in science must look upon knowledge as a treasure entrusted to their care, but belonging to the whole people.

Kliment Timiryazev

The fossil record says eloquently that profuse evolution had indeed occurred over millions of years, but the data just aren't sensitive enough to analyze evolutionary kinetics. This is the province of the evolutionary geneticist who works with descent and change in populations of present-day organisms.

Hampton L. Carson (biologist)

We suggest that in the next decades fisheries management will have to emphasize the rebuilding of fish populations embedded within functional food webs, within large 'no-take' marine protected areas.

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

Like many great ideas in biology, the idea implicating infectious causation in chronic diseases, though simple, has far-reaching implications. It is so simple and so significant, that one would think it would have been recognized by many and would be the starting point for any discussion on the causes of disease. Not yet.

A group is often slower to see the flame of truth than a single open-minded individual. A group must be conservative and being so may run the danger of attempting to hold with both the old and the new—an impossibility when one is incompatible with the other.

Ernest Everett Just

Scientists who do deny their politics—who claim to be objective and unemotional about gender while living in a world where even boats and automobiles are identified by sex—are fooling both themselves and the public at large.

Anne Fausto-Sterling

If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would probably design something like a classroom.

No one who attentively examines the progress of any department of Science, save such as are (like Mathematics or Metaphysics) of a purely abstract character, can fail to perceive how much it is dependent upon the perfection of its instruments.

William Benjamin Carpenter

No competent scientist ought to believe these things on first hearing.

Karl von Frisch