Quotes from Deborah Blum

The U.S. government spends billions of dollars on disasters after they happen, but it pinches pennies when it comes to preparing for them.

In the early twentieth century it had been used to remove the hair of children with scalp infections, such as ringworm, so that doctors could see and treat the fungus. But that practice had been abandoned when too many of the toddlers died.

If your brain does not receive sufficient stimulus, it might find something else to do—it daydreams, it wanders, it thinks about itself. If this goes on too long, it can affect your mind's normal functioning. Chronic boredom correlates with depression and attention deficits.

Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete.

At Stone's direction, Harry removed ovaries, blinded the female rats, and removed their olfactory bulbs. Sightless, hormone-deprived—it didn't matter. The mother rats crawled determinedly toward the baby rats. They were slower, maybe, but the homing instinct was magnetic, needle to the north.

We and all the others and everyone—regardless of the lives we'd led, and more than anything else, and beyond the agonies and dangers that attend every act and action of ours in this life, we all wanted to live. And that desire, if not the result, is something to think about.

Your experiences today will influence the molecular composition of your body for the next two to three months," he tells his audience, "or, perhaps, for the rest of your life. Plan your day accordingly.

At the end, in Harry's handiwork, there's nothing sentimental about love, no sunlit clouds and glory notes – it's a substantial, earthbound connection, grounded in effort, kindness and decency. Learning to love, Harry liked to say, is really about learning to live. Perhaps everyday affection seems a small facet of love. Perhaps, though, it is the modest, steady responses that see us through day after day, that stretch into a life of close and loving relationships.

Choosing not to feel pain is choosing a sort of death, a withering away of the expansive self.

Knowing the poison is never the same as knowing the killer.

did you know that way back in the 1980s some scientists proposed an ambitious effort called the Human Protein Project to map all human proteins? It never happened. Instead, the NIH backed the Human Genome Project for one big reason: Proteins were tough to study, while genes were far easier to sequence. The tools dictate the science.

At the present time I am spending nearly $300 a month from my own personal funds for work which in my opinion has absolutely to be done to keep up the work of the office

Human life must be cheap to the one who can place the dollar above it -John Ruston