Quotes from Carl Zimmer

At long last, we may be returning to the original two-sided sense of the word virus, which originally signified either a life-giving substance or a deadly venom. Viruses are indeed exquisitely deadly, but they have provided the world with some of its most important innovations. Creation and destruction join together once more.

Based on the number of viruses she found in her samples, Proctor estimated that every liter of seawater contained up to one hundred billion viruses.

Poverty may be powerful enough to swamp the influence of variants in our DNA.

I am a single, useless snail-loathing datum.

In 2009, for example, a team of scientists at MIT succeded in implanting a wireless electrode into a zebra fish. With the press of a button, the scientists could wirelessly transmit a signal to the song-producing region of the bird's brain. The bird instantly stopped singing.

The question of when life begins is answered according to the purposes for which we ask it.

It is we who are the parasites, and Earth the host

When we see faces, we don't just recognize them; we also make the same face, if only for a moment.

They have come up with a bold idea: Our minds, too, are shaped by conflict between our parents' genes.

He might breed them for years before reaching the proper form. After a few years of breeding a type of lily, Burbank found a single specimen that met his standards. A rabbit ate it.

It may be hard to imagine a world before antibiotics, but now we must imagine a world where antibiotics are not the only weapon we use against bacteria. And now, ninety years after Herelle first encountered bacteriophages, these viruses may finally be ready to become a part of modern medicine.

Among children who grew up in affluent families, the heritability was about 60 percent. But twins from poorer families showed no greater correlation than other siblings. Their heritability was close to zero.

The idea of a pure race is not even a legitimate abstraction," Dobzhansky wrote. "It is a subterfuge to cloak one's ignorance.

It was a biochemical Jackson Pollock: a field of strings, tangles, loops.

We'd be better prepared for these emergencies if they didn't always come as such surprises. The next plague may start when yet another virus in some wild animal jumps into our species—a virus we might not yet even know about. To reduce that ignorance, scientists are surveying animals, searching for bits of genetic material from viruses. But because we live on a planet of viruses, that task is enormous.

The Europeans unwittingly brought a biological weapon with them that gave the invaders a brutal advantage over their opponents. With no immunity whatsoever to smallpox, Native Americans died in droves when they were exposed to the virus. In Central America, over 90 percent of the native population is believed to have died of smallpox in the decades following the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the early 1500s.

If you're looking for your own idea of your own identity you know the human genome may not be the best place to look for it. You're just looking at a bunch of viruses.