Quotes About Biology

The basic point is so important I'll repeat it: RNA viruses mutate profligately.

Darwin wrote: "organized beings represent a tree.

What makes a species of insect—or of mammal, or of microbe—capable of the outbreak phenomenon? That's a complicated question that the experts are still trying to answer.

INFECTIOUS DISEASE IS all around us. Infectious disease is a kind of natural mortar binding one creature to another, one species to another, within the elaborate biophysical edifices we call ecosystems.

With our virus, people like to say, they'll say, 'Oh, you study that virus that causes the insect to explode!' Like, the virus doesn't cause the insect to explode," he insisted. "It causes it to melt.

The order Chiroptera (the "hand-wing" creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat. Such

The ribosome did not contain the recipe for the protein; it was a tape reader. It could make any protein so long as it was fed the right tape of "messenger" RNA.

A plate of Ebola virions mixed with Hendra virions would resemble capellini in a light sauce of capers.

Does a virus constitute wildlife?

It was "the condition of the germ," not the character of the human population, that determined the course of the epidemic.

Bats come in many, many forms. The order Chiroptera (the "hand-wing" creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat. Such diversity might suggest that bats don't harbor more than their share of viruses; it could be, instead, that their viral burden is proportional to their share of all mammal diversity, and thus just seems surprisingly large.

Three: But now the disruption of natural ecosystems seems more and more to be unloosing such microbes into a wider world.

scrum of paramyxovirus, containing long filaments with a sort

Cualquiera que defienda el diseño inteligente en lugar de la evolución debería pararse a pensar en por qué Dios habría dedicado tal parte de Su inteligencia a diseñar los parásitos de la malaria.

two aspects of a virus in action: transmissibility and virulence. These

molecular phylogenetics.

Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.

Sir Peter Medawar, an eminent British biologist who received a Nobel Prize the same year as Macfarlane Burnet, defined a virus as "a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein.

Life is stranger than biology textbooks.

A flower's structure leads a bee toward having pollen adhere to its body . . . we don't know of any such reason why beautiful places attract humans.

fundamental principle of the body's weight-control systems: Impose a change in behavior (for example, by restricting food), and biology fights back (with increased hunger). Change biology, however, and behavior adapts naturally—suggesting a more effective approach to long-term weight management.

These recent findings support the notion that "cancer genes" may not be so harmful if not triggered by our unhealthy lifestyle

When left unattended, these feelings—not the stresses of life themselves—contribute to the inflammatory processes that can help cancer grow.

This is what I learned: If we all have a potential cancer lying dormant in us, each of us also has a body designed to fight the process of tumor development. It is up to each of us to use our body's natural defenses.