Quotes About Biology

I think people who have all kinds of debilitating mobility issues will benefit from robotic augmentation. That is, even before we get into organ replacement and organ printing and synthetic biology and so on and so forth.

Synthetic biology can help address key challenges facing the planet and its population. Research in synthetic biology may lead to new things such as programmed cells that self-assemble at the sites of disease to repair damage.

In chemicals, Synthetic Genomics is one of my real loves.

The soil is not a mass of dead debris, merely resulting from the physical and chemical weathering of rocks; it is a more or less homogeneous system which has resulted from the decomposition of plant and animal remains. It is teeming with life.

To develop drugs for people, we basically dismantle the system. In the lab, we look at things the size of a cell or two. We dismantle life into very small models.

There are receptors to these molecules in your immune system, in your gut and in your heart. So when you say, 'I have a gut feeling' or 'my heart is sad' or 'I am bursting with joy,' you're not speaking metaphorically. You're speaking literally.

In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.

Over time, our inescapable, systemic, fundamentally human impurity gives us the capacity to do what has not been done before: to make creative leaps in our biology, in the diseases we can resist and the foods we can digest. And in our thinking and culture and politics, too.

You can't find truth so easily in disorder. Grammar—and biology—and chemistry—and math—they keep things in order. We wouldn't know much without order. Good grammar does matter.

Man is a successful animal, that's all.

Le succès de cette théorie fut d'ailleurs dû pour une bonne part à des raisons qui n'ont rien de « scientifique », mais qui tiennent directement à son caractère antitraditionnel ; pour les mêmes raisons, il est à prévoir que, alors même qu'aucun biologiste sérieux n'y croira plus, elle subsistera longtemps encore dans les manuels scolaires et les ouvrages de vulgarisation.

It was quite conceivable that Miss Tenzer had aroused in some man, possibly Richard Valdon, the kind of reaction that is an important factor in the propagation of the species; in fact, in more men than one.

las serpientes viven con el veneno adentro de sus cuerpos sin haberlo decidido

For Darwinian biology the organism is the nexus of the internal and external forces. It is only through natural selection of internally produced variations, which happen to match by chance the externally generated environmental demands, that what is outside and what is inside confront each other.

Biology Under the Influence is a collection of our essays built around the general theme of the dual nature of science. On the one hand, science is the generic development of human knowledge over the millennia, but on the other it is the increasingly commodified specific product of a capitalist knowledge industry.

When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

The chicken is only an egg's way for making another egg.

The lethal dose of honey bee venom in humans is around 19 stings per 2.2 pounds (1 kg) of body weight or about 1,300 stings for a 150-pound (68-kg) person.

Every new discovery about the genome is consistent with evolution having happened. Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a real part of the world.

Tinamous are almost certainly the most primitive living birds.