Quotes from Carl Zimmer

Influenza. If you close your eyes and say the word aloud, it sounds lovely. It would make a good name for a pleasant, ancient Italian village.

Human rhinoviruses may help train our immune systems not to overreact to minor triggers, instead directing their assaults to real threats. Perhaps we should not think of colds as ancient enemies but as wise old tutors.

What is striking about them is that the father-leaning disorders tend to produce autistic symptoms. The mother-leaning disorders tend to produce schizophrenic ones.

They found that the fetal cells from their sons reached their brains, sprouted branches, and pumped out neurotransmitters. Their sons helped shape their thoughts.

When Europeans colonized Africa, they helped trigger giant epidemics by forcing people to stay and work in tsetse-infested places. In 1906, Winston Churchill, who was the colonial undersecretary at the time, told the House of Commons that one sleeping sickness epidemic had reduced the population of Uganda from 6.5 million to 2.5 million.

To my surprise, I discovered that anesthesiologists are a bit in the dark themselves. "How anesthesia works has been a mystery since the discovery of anesthesia itself," writes Michael Alkire, an anesthesiologist at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, in the new Encyclopedia of Consciousness.

And of those responding neurons, 51 fired in response to only a single person or thing. One neuron responded only to Halle Berry, for example. Amazingly, the "Halle Berry" neuron responded to any picture of her, including one in which she was dressed as the masked Catwoman. Even the name Halle Berry triggered that neuron, which was silent at the sight of other actresses or their names.

tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt.

It was the first time anyone had found a virus of a virus. It was yet another thing that ought not to exist.

When news of the results got out, it caused many Americans to look at their country with a new sense of self-loathing. "We have a working majority of voters who have children's minds," a prominent newspaper editor named William Allen White declared.

They're also a danger to us all, because they help foster the evolution of increasingly drug-resistant bacteria in our bodies and in the environment

White was convinced that the "moron majority," as he dubbed it, must be a recent development.

defective genes.

Based on their research, the Sanger scientists estimated that an embryo gains two or three new mutations every time its cells double.

A virus does not reproduce by copying its own genes and dividing in two. Instead, it invades a host cell.

The ability to read DNA allowed scientists to measure this genetic similarity in real people. In 2006, Peter Visscher, a geneticist at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Australia, and his colleagues studied 4,401 pairs of siblings, examining several hundred genetic markers in each volunteer. The siblings often had a series of identical genetic markers along a chromosome—segments they inherited from one of their parents.

Mercado urged instead that people with the same defect not marry, because their children would be at greatest risk of developing the same hereditary disease. All people should seek out a spouse as different from themselves in as many individual characteristics as possible.

In fact, Galton believed England's future well-being depended on a national breeding program to produce more talented humans.

He imagined this program as a joyous ritual, bringing gifted young people together to have better and better children.

We humans have 23 pairs, but pea plants have only 7. Yeast have 16. Some butterflies have 134.

When the World Health Organization officially declared smallpox eradicated in 1980, those laboratory stocks remained. All it would take to reverse that eradication was for someone to accidentally set the virus loose.

Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties," Galton predicted.

Terrorists might even try to use it as a biological weapon. Making matters worse, people were no longer getting smallpox vaccines, and so what immunity the public had to the virus was waning.

Chromosomes were chemical mixtures, including proteins as well as a mysterious molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA for short.