Quotes About Research

The first thing to do when you have amassed your bibliography is to inspect all of the books on your list. You should not read any of them analytically before inspecting all of them.

Most of these scientists were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover that they were unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.

I stopped avoiding the articles and the scientific studies and read everything I could find. I also stopped outsourcing the problem to the environmentalists, stopped telling myself this was somebody else's issue, somebody else's job.

He was a thing of books and alembics to me, library and laboratory.

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.

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

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.

single base may change from A to C. A stretch of a hundred bases may be accidentally copied out twice. A thousand bases may be cut out altogether. These are the mutations that scientists like Hugo de Vries and Thomas Hunt Morgan spent years trying to figure out. Mutations can produce new versions of genes—alleles, as they came to be known.

Ian Lipkin and his colleagues at Columbia University trapped 133 rats in New York City and discovered 18 new species of viruses that are closely related to human pathogens.

Some identical twins are recorded as fraternal at birth, and fraternal ones as identical. A genetic test can easily reveal the true nature of newborn twins, but doctors apparently don't bother with it much. In a 2004 study in Japan, researchers found that hospitals misclassify as many as 30 percent of twins. In the Netherlands, researchers tested the DNA of 327 pairs of twins and then asked their parents what kind of twins they were. Nineteen percent of the parents gave the wrong answer.

That's not because HPV was rare—far from it: a 2014 study on 103 healthy people detected the viruses in 71 of them—about 69 percent.

Skinner and his colleagues launched a new study to see how far this effect could get passed down. They exposed more female rats to vinclozolin and then bred descendants for several generations. Even after four generations, they found, males kept on developing damaged sperm. Exposures to other chemicals, like DEET and jet fuel, could also alter the rats for generations.

Ian Lipkin and his colleagues at Columbia University trapped 133 rats in New York City and discovered 18 new species of viruses that are closely related to human pathogens. In another study in Bangladesh, they examined a bat called the Indian flying fox and tried to identify every single virus that calls it home. They identified 55 species, 50 of which are new to science.

Even the love of study can make people unbelievably selfish; the passion for research can make men as mad and blind as termites in their dark tunnel.

Therefore, anthropology, the study of man, should be the core of every other discipline. Someday, it will.

Most of us made a rather extensive study of heterosexuality before leaving it behind. -Pat Califia

Future research in the field of health will be directed toward studying the ways we affect our physical human chemistry through our emotional chemistry and our mental attitudes.

You can never have too much information. Gather it in and then sift it, and let the unimportant fall through the small holes.

The following morning Nancy spent two hours at the library examining old atlases and historic records. Although the librarian permitted her access to some old and precious maps, she could find no chart which bore any resemblance to the scrap in her possession.

The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.

But I think you're failing to understand exactly what a dissertation is supposed to be. It's not meant to change the world or revolutionize the way we think about anything. It's meant to be a document that I can read and the rest of the committee can read to show us that you have enough understanding to warrant a PhD. That's all. Once you have the PhD, once you leave here, or stay here and become a professor, that's when your real work will start.

Why was it librarians had such a prim image? With all the information available in books right there at their fingertips, librarians could be the best-informed people around. About anything.

I have always been fascinated by the story of Henrietta Lacks.

It's really hard for me to memorize the medical jargon if I don't know the meaning of every single word. So I do have to do a little Wikipedia/YouTube research to figure out what I'm talking about.