The Impossible Takes Longer (15 page)
Read The Impossible Takes Longer Online
Authors: David Pratt
Konrad Lorenz
MEDICINE, 1973
865. I do not believe that evolution is a well-established fact, but on the contrary, in my view its concepts are largely speculative.
Ernst Chain
MEDICINE, 1945
866. For me, faith begins with the realization that a supreme intelligence brought the universe into being and created man. It is not difficult for me to have this faith, for an orderly, intelligent universe testifies to the greatest statement ever uttered: "In the beginning, God."
Arthur Compton
PHYSICS, 1927
867. The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole, in that the universe appears to have order and purpose.
Arno Penzias
PHYSICS, 1978
868. This world is most consistent with purposeful creation.
Arno Penzias
PHYSICS, 1978
869. We've discovered the secret of life.
Francis Crick
MEDICINE, 1962
Announced by Crick as he entered the Eagle Pub in Cambridge on February 28,1953
870. DNA, you know, is Midas' gold. Everybody who touches it goes mad.
Maurice Wilkins
MEDICINE, 1962
871. It is time for us to take charge of our own evolution.
James Watson
MEDICINE, 1962
872. If you really are stupid, I would call that a disease . . . People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.
James Watson
MEDICINE, 1962
873. Some day a child is going to sue its parents for being born. They will say, my life is so awful with these terrible genetic defects and you just callously didn't find out.
James Watson
MEDICINE, 1962
874. The controlled injection of the gene for human growth hormone into fertilized human ova could easily lead, in twenty years, to a Minnesota football team made up entirely of nine-foot players.
Christian Anfinsen
CHEMISTRY, 1972
875. It is just a matter of time until we will be able to clone human beings. Then, over the long run, it will no longer be possible to oudaw it.
Eric Wieschaus
MEDICINE, 1995
876. Actually we do quite a lot of cloning of persons already. We do it in institutions called armies, schools; we try to make everybody a standard issue.
Sydney Brenner
MEDICINE, 2002
877. I was asked at a lecture by someone in the audience who said, why can't I clone myself and keep the copies as spare parts? And my answer was, be careful, one of the copies might keep you for spare parts.
Sydney Brenner
MEDICINE, 2002
878. The lot of both man and nature could improve if there were fewer people and more wild animals.
Murray Gell-Mann
PHYSICS, 1969
879. The world could get along very well without literature; it could get along even better without man.
Jean-Paul Sartre
LITERATURE, 1964
880. Astronomers say we have another two billion years before Earth is too hot to live on. If we could begin to engage this question, we might be guided to a suitable stewardship for our planet, and it might look a little different from the plans that are being made today.
John C. Mather
PHYSICS, 2006
881. Let there be no doubt about the conclusions of the scientific community: the threat of global warming is very real and action is needed immediately. It is a grave error to believe that we can continue to procrastinate. Scientists do not believe this and no one else should either.
Henry Kendall
PHYSICS, 1990
882. Whatever happens, it is clear that the immense, stupid, and suicidal waste of natural resources must come to an immediate end if the human species wishes to survive on this earth.
Octavio Paz
LITERATURE, 1990
883. There are many injustices in the world, but there is one of which no one speaks, which is that of climate.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
884. The urban man is an uprooted tree, he can put out leaves, flowers and grow fruit but what a nostalgia his leaf, flower, and fruit will always have for mother earth!
Juan Ramón Jiménez
LITERATURE, 1956
885. The growth of an impersonal concrete jungle direcdy leads to the psychosis, neuroses, maniacal and freakish behavior evident in the major cities of the so-called developed world.
Wangari Maathai
PEACE, 2004
886. God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.
Paul Dirac
PHYSICS, 1933
887. Mathematics is just a tool to guide our intuition.
Arno Penzias
PHYSICS, 1978
888. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
889. The physicists defer only to the mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God (though you may be hard pressed to find a mathematician that modest).
Leon Lederman
PHYSICS, 1988
890. I have many students in my core course at Harvard who are so afraid of anything to do with mathematics or even just numbers that it's like an allergy. You think dyslexia is a problem? The hidden disease of being unable to deal with numbers is both more prevalent and much more serious.
Sheldon Glashow
PHYSICS, 1979
891. The official photographer informed me that I was the 137th Nobel laureate of whom he has had to make a portrait. Certainly all of you know that 137 is a magic, quasi-mystical number in physics. It is equal to the velocity of light times the reduced Planck constant divided by the square of the electron charge! This number governs the size of all objects in the Universe. Some people claim that if this value were to be slighdy different life would not be possible.
Georges Charpak
PHYSICS, 1992
892. All our lauded technological progress—our very civilization—is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
893. Our society is permeated not by science, but by an exploitative distortion of science-based technology, as irrational as the irrational aspects of religion.
Salvador Luria
MEDICINE, 1969
894. For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman
PHYSICS, 1965
895. All the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written . . . in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide—which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye.
Richard Feynman
PHYSICS, 1965
896. Today, we are already working on tiny minicomputers with completely new kinds of chips . . . With these, we might be able to construct devices that work even faster than the fastest computers of today but that are nevertheless so small that we can build them directly into our bodies or our brains.
Gerd Binnig
PHYSICS, 1986
897. It is time the American people were told frankly that the present space program is technically impressive, scientifically trivial, culturally misguided, and socially preposterous.
Salvador Luria
MEDICINE, 1969
898. The automobile is a pecu Harly fertile species that reproduces freely and appears to have no natural enemies sufficiendy powerful to hold its growth in check.
Glenn Seaborg
CHEMISTRY, 1951
899. You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.
Robert Solow
ECONOMICS, 1987
The history of the Nobel Prize for Medicine is the history of medical progress since 1900. Before Frederick Banting's work on insulin, diabetics were condemned to slow death. Before antibiotics, doctors could provide only symptomatic treatment for most disease. The work of Edward Thomas on bone marrow transplantation raised leukemia survival rates from zero to 50 percent. That of Peter Medawar, Baruj Benacerraf, Jean Dausset, and Joseph Murray on organ transplants gave new life to innumerable kidney and heart patients.
Two examples may serve to illustrate the quality of commitment that Alfred Nobel sought to honor in his institution of the Nobel prizes. In 1929, Werner Forssmann, then a twenty-five-year-old surgical resident, inserted a cannula into a vein in his arm, advanced a catheter 65 cm until he felt it enter the right ventricle of his heart, walked down to the X-ray room, and had an X-ray taken. This was the first heart catheterization, and when his supervisor learned of it, Forssmann was fired. He had to wait until after World War II, during which he spent harrowing years as a surgeon major in the Wehrmacht, before his discovery was honored with the Nobel Prize.
More recent is the example of Barry Marshall, who won the
prize for Medicine in 2005. Convinced that stomach ulcers were caused by the bacterium
Helicobacter pylori,
he mixed up a growth of some billion bacteria in a petri dish and, to the horror of his lab assistant, swallowed it. His subsequent discomfort, illness, endoscopy, antibiotic treatment, and recovery coiifirmed his hypothesis.
900. Advances in medicine and the possibilities of human happiness created by the relief of suffering are a great embarrassment to those determined to think nothing but evil of science and technology.
Peter Medawar
MEDICINE, i960
901. The average patient looks upon the average doctor very much as the non-combatant looks upon the troops fighting on his behalf. The more trained men there are between his body and the enemy the better.
Rudyard Kipling
LITERATURE, 1907
902. A good gulp of hot whisky at bedtime—it's not very scientific, but it helps.
Alexander Fleming
MEDICINE, 1945
On treatment of the common cold
903. There are people in the world, I think they're probably a minority but they're certainly a substantial minority, who believe that basically health is something you buy. If you have money you can buy health, if you have more money, you can buy greater health. I'm one of the other people who say that health, at least at the most basic level, never mind the trimmings, is something that should be a universal right to everybody. I think it's important for the progress of humanity and indeed all sorts of other things, the peace of the world and so forth, is underpinned by health care. Now as soon as you take that view, then you have to say and I do, that anything that blocks that cheapest possible point-of-care delivery of health is wrong and we have to find some way not to allow that.
John Sulston
MEDICINE, 2002