Quotes from Walter Isaacson

four bases in DNA: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, now commonly known by the letters A, T, G, and C.

There was the mother who offered up three of her flock of sons, the Dutch surgeon who wanted to study bodies that had been blown apart, and the Benedictine monk who promised to pray for America if it would pay off his gambling debts.

like all great beauty, his music was pure simplicity.

Debo dejar los asuntos molestos en manos de personas objetivas.

For the fashionable gentlemen of the aristocracy, elegant eating and gambling clubs, such as White's and later Brookes's and Boodle's, were starting to spring up in St. James's. For the burgeoning new class of writers, journalists, professionals, and intellectuals whose company Franklin preferred, there were the coffeehouses.

He had let it be known that he believed that men and women were not naturally monogamous.

The thrust of his parent's views, at least when applied to the situation of Mileva Maric rather than Marie Winteler, was that a wife was a luxury, affordable only when a man was making a comfortable living. I have a low opinion of that view of a relationship between a man and wife, he [Einstein] told Maric, Because it makes the wife and the prostitute distinguishable only insofar as the former is able to secure a life-long contract.

Thus it was that Einstein ended up deciding that quantum mechanics, though it may not be wrong, was at least incomplete. There must be a fuller explanation of how the universe operates, one that would incorporate both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. In doing so, it would not leave things to chance.

And we would relate to the way he tried to balance, sometimes uneasily, the pursuit of reputation, wealth, earthly virtues, and spiritual values.2

Weizmann was a brilliant biochemist who had emigrated from Russia to England, where he helped his adopted nation in the First World War by coming up with a bacterial method for more efficiently manufacturing the explosive cordite.

Los intereses de un ser humano vienen determinados, en gran medida, por sus apetitos, deseos, impulsos e instintos», dijo Braithwaite

It's good to have strong opinions about gene engineering in humans, but it's even better if you know what a gene is.

It was a grand triumph but not one easily understood. The skeptical Silverstein came up to Eddington and said that people believed that only three scientists in the world understood general relativity. He had been told that Eddington was one of them. The shy Quaker said nothing. Don't be modest, Eddington, said Silverstein. Replied Eddington, On the contrary, I'm just wondering who the third might be.

For Franklin, it was an insight into human foibles rather than evil. "He wished to please everybody," Franklin later said of Keith, "and having little to give, he gave expectations.

Regardez ! J'ai dessiné un cercle ! s'exclama Warhol après avoir joué avec MacDraw.

So Einstein rejected the emission theory in favor of postulating that the speed of a light beam was constant no matter how fast its source was moving. "I came to the conviction that all light should be defined by frequency and intensity alone, completely independently of whether it comes from a moving or from a stationary light source," he told Ehrenfest.

Stoop, young man, stoop—as you go through this world—and you'll miss many hard thumps.

Just as inertial mass and gravitational mass are equivalent, so too there is an equivalence, he realized, between all inertial effects, such as resistance to acceleration, and gravitational effects, such as weight. His insight was that they are both manifestations of the same structure, which we now sometimes call the inertio-gravitational field.

Back in 1917, when Einstein had analyzed the "cosmological considerations" arising from his general theory of relativity, most astronomers thought that the universe consisted only of our Milky Way, floating with its 100 billion or so stars in a void of empty space.

It was by all accounts a pleasant Atlantic crossing, during which Einstein tried to explain relativity to Weissmann. Asked upon their arrival whether he understood the theory, Weissmann gave a delightful reply. During the crossing, Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.

Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life."25

For his doctorate, he went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he figured out how non-coding regions of our genome, previously described as "junk DNA," could play a role in disease progression.

Kissinger would probably be outraged even if he reread his own memoirs, on the grounds that they are not favorable enough.

Decidere quello che non si deve fare è non meno importante che decidere quello che si deve fare.