Quotes from Lewis Wolpert

I regard it as ethically unacceptable and impractical to censor any aspect of trying to understand the nature of our world.

There is zero evidence for god.

The image of the disinterested, dispassionate scientist is no less false than that of the mad scientist who is willing to destroy the world for knowledge.

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Reliable scientific knowledge is value free and has no moral or ethical value. Science tells us how the world is. ... Dangers and ethical issue arise only when science is applied as technology.

It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life.

A quite rare but nevertheless important event before gastrulation in mammalian embryos, including humans, is the splitting of the embryo into two, and identical twins can then develop. This shows the remarkable ability of the early embryo to regulate and develop normally when half the normal size, just like the Driesch experiment. It also makes clear that the early embryo should not be thought of as a human being as it can still develop into two people.

Arriving at cell theory has been considered even more important to biology than Darwin's theory of evolution

Finally, we can contemplate the evolution of our understanding of developmental biology. Progress has been impressive but due to the complexity of cells with all their proteins and other molecules interacting, there is still much to be learned. It is likely that in the next 50 years, given the genes and structure of a fertilized egg, it will be possible to reliably compute the details of that organism's development and just what the adult would be.

In humans, about 1 in 100 live-born infants has some congenital heart malformation, while in utero, heart malformation leading to death of the embryo occurs in between 5 and 10% of conceptions.

It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life

Neurons are formed in the proliferative zone of the vertebrate neural tube from multipotent neural stem cells, which give rise to many different types of neurons and to glia. For many years it was thought that no new neurons could be generated in the adult mammalian brain, but the production of new neurons has been demonstrated as a normal occurrence in the adult mammalian brain, and neural stem cells have been identified in adult mammals that can generate neurons.

Science, as I have argued, goes against common sense, and we also usually lack the necessary information on which to make a scientific judgement. But more importantly, our belief engine, programmed in our brains by our genes, operates on different principles. It prefers quick decisions, it is bad with numbers, loves representativeness, and sees patterns where often there is only randomness. It is too often influenced by authority, and it has a liking for mysticism.

When Alice says she cannot believe in impossible things, the Queen replies: 'I dare say you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.