Scientists from the United States

"Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions."

"Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about."

"For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role."

"Quantum mechanics is weird. I don't understand it. Just live with it. You don't have to understand the nature of things in order to build cool devices…If you can figure out how to take advantage of this quantum multitasking, we can build computers that can do computations that no classical computer could do even if it were the size of the entire universe."

"“Global warming” refers to the global-average temperature increase that has been observed over the last one hundred years or more. But to many politicians and the public, the term carries the implication that mankind is responsible for that warming. This website describes evidence from my group’s government-funded research that suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution. Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work."

"You would think that we’d know the Earth’s ‘climate sensitivity’ by now, but it has been surprisingly difficult to determine. How atmospheric processes like clouds and precipitation systems respond to warming is critical, as they are either amplifying the warming, or reducing it. This website currently concentrates on the response of clouds to warming, an issue which I am now convinced the scientific community has totally misinterpreted when they have measured natural, year-to-year fluctuations in the climate system. As a result of that confusion, they have the mistaken belief that climate sensitivity is high, when in fact the satellite evidence suggests climate sensitivity is low."

"I discovered that the computer is not like the violin; it doesn't take inborn genius or a lifetime of practice to get sweet music out of it."

"It's all done with gears. Also pinions, snails, arbors; pawls and ratchets; and cam followers; cables, levers, bell cranks, and pivots."

"The fact is, winding and dusting and fixing somebody else's clock is boring."

"Fretting about a dearth of randomness seems like worrying that humanity might use up its last reserves of ignorance."

"The fact that randomness requires a physical rather than a mathematical source is noted by almost everyone who writes on the subject, and yet the oddity of this situation is not much remarked."

"The condensation of all property in the hands of one individual is an economic catastrophe-something like the formation of a black hole in astrophysics. It's obviously bad news for the majority of the people, who are left penniless. But even if you happen to be the big winner, your victory may prove hollow. Although you have all the riches in the world, you can't buy a thing, because no one else has goods to sell."

"After a few more centuries, perhaps the poorest billion will even be able to afford the $10.00 buffet."

"Compared with the elegant inventions of the theorists, nature's code seemed a bit of a kludge."

"If saving human lives is the great desideratum, then there is more to be gained by the prevention of drowning, and auto wrecks than by the abolition of war."

"A retired physicist reading the Encyclopedia Britannica can do just so much toward securing world peace."

"Empires come and go; so do ideologies and even religions, but war marches on through it all."

"How can we measure the effects if we can't even count the dead to the nearest million?"

"I am reminded of those prodigies who spent years of their lives calculating digits of the decimal expansion of pi - a task that is now a mere warm-up exercise for computer software. I cannot help wandering which of my labors will appear equally quaint and pathetic to some future reader who ransacks libraries for old volumes like this one."

"The whirling gears of progress have put the gear makers out of work."

"By the way, the = notation was invented by Robert Recorde (1510-1558). He choose two parallel lines as a symbol of equality " because noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle.""

"The integers, the rationals, and the irrationals, taken together, make up the continuum of real numbers. It's called a continuum because the numbers are packed together along the real number line with no empty spaces between them."

"A big advantage of the serial-number approach to identity is that things stay the same even as they change."

"In 1948 John Archibald Wheeler, in a telephone conversation with his student Richard Feynman, proposed the delightful hypothesis that there is just one electron in the universe."

"The absence of a golden rule for mattress flipping is a disappointment, but it does not pertend the demise of civilization. We can adapt; we can learn to live with it."

"I'm not a mathematician, but I've been hanging around with some of them long enough to know how the game is played."

"I'm not a gambling person, but I've been around long enough and I know how to play it."

"Here is this mass of jelly - three pound mass of jelly - that you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, it can contemplate the meaning of infinity, and it can contemplate itself contemplating the meaning of infinity."

"What neurology tells us is that the self consists of many components, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion."

"Your "conscious life" is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons."

"Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don't feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence."

"Any ape can reach for a banana, but only a human can reach for the stars or even know what that means."

"Whether a country is to be called 'civilised' or not, depends not on how affluent the upper 10 per cent are, but how well they treat the lower 10 per cent."

"Many lonely women, more than can safely admit it, secretly hope to meet a gentleman; but the vast majority steadfastly refuse to be ladies—indeed, no longer know what it means. Small wonder, then, so much sexual harassment and even rape. When power becomes the name of the game, the stronger will get his way. Under such circumstances, one cannot exactly blame women for wanting to learn how to defend themselves against sexual attack. But, addressing the symptom not the cause, the remedies of karate and “take back the night”—and, still more, the shallow beliefs about sexual liberation that support these practices—can only complete the destruction of healthy relations between man and woman. For, truth to tell, the night never did and never can belong to women, except for the infamous women-of-the-night. Only a restoration of sexual self-restraint and sexual self-respect—for both men and women—can reverse our rapid slide toward Shechem."

"In a certain sense the dietary laws push the Children of Israel back in the direction of the "original" "vegetarianism" of the pristine and innocent Garden of Eden. Although not all flesh is forbidden, everything that is forbidden is flesh. Thus any strict vegetarian, one could say, never violates the Jewish dietary laws. Yet though he does not violate them, he could not be said to follow them. For only unknowingly does he not violate them, and, more to the point, he refrains indiscriminately, that is, without regard to the distinctions among the kinds of living things that might and might not be edible. In this sense the strict vegetarian, though he rejects the Noachic permission to eat meat, shares exactly the indiscriminate Noachic grouping-together of all the animals and its concentration only on the blood, which is the life."

"The supreme virtue of the virtuous woman was modesty, a form of sexual self-control, manifested not only in chastity but in decorous dress and manner, speech and deed, and in reticence in the display of her well-banked affections. A virtue, as it were, made for courtship, it served simultaneously as a source of attraction and a spur to manly ardor, a guard against a woman's own desires, as well as a defense against unworthy suitors. A fine woman understood that giving her body (in earlier times, even her kiss) meant giving her heart, which was too precious to be bestowed on anyone who would not prove himself worthy, at the very least by pledging himself in marriage to be her defender and lover forever."

"Revulsion is not an argument; and some of yesterday's repugnances are today calmly accepted—though, one must add, not always for the better. In crucial cases, however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom beyond reason's power fully to articulate it. Can anyone really give an argument fully adequate to the horror which is father-daughter incest (even with consent), or having sex with animals, or mutilating a corpse, or eating human flesh, or raping or murdering another human being? Would anybody's failure to give full rational justification for his revulsion at those practices make that revulsion ethically suspect? Not at all. On the contrary, we are suspicious of those who think that they can rationalize away our horror, say, by trying to explain the enormity of incest with arguments only about the genetic risks of inbreeding.The repugnance at human cloning belongs in that category. We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings not because of the strangeness or novelty of the undertaking, but because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder."

"Ours is the age of atomic power but also of nuclear proliferation, of globalized trade but also worldwide terrorism, of instant communication but also fragmented communities, of free association but also marital failure, of limitless mobility but also homogenized destinations, of open borders but also confused identities, of astounding medical advances but also greater worries about health, of longer and more vigorous lives but also protracted and more miserable deaths, of unprecedented freedom and prosperity but also remarkable anxiety about our future, both personal and national. In our age of heightened expectations, many Americans fear that their children’s lives will be less free, less prosperous, or less fulfilling than their own, a fear that is shared by the young people themselves. Like their forebears, our youth still harbor desires for a worthy life. They still hope to find meaning in their lives and to live a life that makes sense. But they are increasingly confused about what a worthy life might look like, and about how they might be able to live one."

"Ancient science had sought knowledge of what things are, to be contemplated as an end in itself satisfying to the knower. In contrast, modern science seeks knowledge of how things work, to be used as a means for the relief and comfort of all humanity, knowers and non-knowers alike."

"Even the modern word "concept" means "a grasping together," implying that the mind itself, in its act of knowing, functions like the intervening hand (in contrast to its ancient counterpart, “idea,” “that which can be beheld,” which implies that the mind functions like the receiving eye). And modern science rejects, as meaningless or useless, questions that cannot be answered by the application of method. Science becomes not the representation and demonstration of truth, but an art: the art of finding the truth—or, rather, that portion of truth that lends itself to be artfully found."

"The truths modern science finds—even about human beings—are value-neutral, in no way restraining, and indeed perfectly adapted for, technical application. In short, as Hans Jonas has put it, modern science contains manipulability at its theoretical core—and this remains true even for those great scientists who are themselves motivated by the desire for truth and who have no interest in that mastery over nature to which their discoveries nonetheless contribute and for which science is largely esteemed by the rest of us and mightily supported by the modern state."

"Could technology, understood as the disposition and activity of mastery, turn out to be a stumbling block in the path of the master himself?"

"Francis Bacon, in his New Atlantis, could charge his elite scientists in Salomon’s House with practicing self-censorship to avoid publicizing dangerous knowledge. Here is how the Father of Salomon’s House describes their practice: “We have consultations, which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not: and take all a oath of secrecy for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret: though some of those we do reveal sometime to the State, and some not.” Bacon, the first prophet of the new relation between science and society and of the “conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate,” knew better than we that knowledge is dangerous, that publication is a public and politically relevant act, and that self-censorship on the part of scientists is necessary and desirable. The passage is also remarkable for its wonderful ambiguity regarding whether scientists or the State has ultimate authority over dangerous knowledge."

"Many of our fellow citizens do not share the blind faith in the simple beneficence of all technological innovation. And because they do not share the corporealist, morally neutral, and in some cases atheistic world-view that they attribute (fairly or not) to science and scientists, they are reluctant to surrender the power of decision to the very people who they think are creating the problem."

"Grappling with real-life concerns — from cloning to courtship, from living authentically to dying with dignity — has made me a better reader. Reciprocally, reading in a wisdom-seeking spirit has helped me greatly in my worldly grapplings. Not being held to the usual dues expected of a licensed humanist — professing specialized knowledge or publishing learned papers — I have been able to wander freely and most profitably in all the humanistic fields. I have come to believe that looking honestly for the human being, following the path wherever it leads, may itself be an integral part of finding it. A real question, graced by a long life to pursue it among the great books, has been an unadulterated blessing."

"Fifty years ago, when Europeans and Americans still distinguished high culture from popular culture, and when classical learning was still highly esteemed in colleges and universities, C. P. Snow delivered his famous Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution." Snow did more than warn of the growing split between the old culture of the humanities and the rising culture of science. He took Britain's literary aristocracy to task for its dangerous dismissal of scientific and technological progress, which Snow believed offered the solutions to the world's deepest problems. In a vitriolic response to Snow, the literary critic F. R. Leavis defended the primacy of the humanities for a civilizing education, insisting that science must not be allowed to operate outside of the moral norms that a first-rate humanistic education alone could provide."

"In contrast to 50 years ago, few licensed humanists today embrace any view of the humanities that could in fact justify making them the centerpiece of a college curriculum."

"Diogenes … refuses to be taken in by complacent popular belief that we already know human goodness from our daily experience, or by confident professorial claims that we can capture the mystery of our humanity in ­definitions. But mocking or not, and perhaps speaking better than he knew, Diogenes gave elegantly simple expression to the humanist quest for self-knowledge: I seek the human being — my human being, your human being, our humanity. In fact, the embellished version of Diogenes' question comes to the same thing: To seek an honest man is, at once, to seek a human being worthy of the name, an honest-to-goodness exemplar of the idea of humanity, a truthful and truth-speaking embodiment of the animal having the power of articulate speech."

"[Medical] science was indeed powerful, but its self-understanding left much to be desired. It knew the human parts in ever-finer detail, but it concerned itself little with the human whole. … The art of healing does not inquire into what health is, or how to get and keep it: The word "health" does not occur in the index of the leading textbooks of medicine. To judge from the way we measure medical progress, largely in terms of mortality ­statistics and defeats of deadly diseases, one gets the unsettling impression that the tacit goal of medicine is not health but rather bodily immortality, with every death today regarded as a tragedy that future medical research will prevent."

"According to Lewis, the dehumanization threatened by the mastery of nature has, at its deepest cause, less the emerging biotechnologies that might directly denature bodies and flatten souls, and more the underlying value-neutral, soulless, and heartless accounts that science proffers of living nature and of man. By expunging from its account of life any notion of soul, aspiration, and purpose, and by setting itself against the evidence of our lived experience, modern biology ultimately undermines our self-understanding as creatures of freedom and dignity, as well as our inherited teachings regarding how to live — teachings linked to philosophical anthropologies that science has now seemingly dethroned."

"I turned to [Aristotle's] De Anima (On Soul), expecting to get help with understanding the difference between a living human being and its corpse, relevant for the difficult task of determining whether some persons on a respirator are alive or dead. I discovered to my amazement that Aristotle has almost no interest in the difference between the living and the dead. Instead, one learns most about life and soul not, as we moderns might suspect, from the boundary conditions when an organism comes into being or passes away, but rather when the organism is at its peak, its capacious body actively at work in energetic relation to—that is, in "souling"—the world: in the activities of sensing, imagining, desiring, moving, and thinking. Even more surprising, in place of our dualistic ideas of soul as either a "ghost in the machine," invoked by some in order to save the notion of free will, or as a separate immortal entity that departs the body at the time of death, invoked by others to address the disturbing fact of apparent personal extinction, Aristotle offers a powerful and still defensible holistic idea of soul as the empowered and empowering "form of a naturally organic body." "Soul" names the unified powers of aliveness, awareness, action, and appetite that living beings all manifest. This is not mysticism or superstition, but biological fact, albeit one that, against current prejudice, recognizes the difference between mere material and its empowering form. Consider, for example, the eye. The eye's power of sight, though it "resides in" and is inseparable from material, is not itself material. Its light-absorbing chemicals do not see the light they absorb. Like any organ, the eye has extension, takes up space, can be touched and grasped by the hand. But neither the power of the eye — sight — nor sight's activity — seeing — is extended, ­touchable, ­corporeal. Sight and seeing are powers and activities of soul, relying on the underlying materials but not reducible to them. Moreover, sight and seeing are not knowable through our objectified science, but only through lived experience. A blind neuroscientist could give precise quantitative details regarding electrical discharges in the eye produced by the stimulus of light, and a blind craftsman could with instruction fashion a good material model of the eye; but sight and seeing can be known only by one who sees."

"For most Americans, ethical matters are usually discussed either in utilitarian terms of weighing competing goods or balancing benefits and harms, looking to the greatest good for the greatest number, or in moralist terms of rules, rights and duties, "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots." Our public ethical discourse is largely negative and "other-directed": We focus on condemning and avoiding misconduct by, or on correcting and preventing injustice to, other people, not on elevating or improving ourselves. How liberating and encouraging, then, to encounter an ethics focused on the question, "How to live?" and that situates what we call the moral life in the larger context of human ­flourishing. How eye-opening are arguments that suggest that happiness is not a state of passive feeling but a life of fulfilling activity, and especially of the unimpeded and excellent activity of our specifically human powers—of acting and making, of thinking and learning, of loving and befriending. How illuminating it is to see the ethical life discussed not in terms of benefits and harms or rules of right and wrong, but in terms of character, and to understand that good character, formed through habituation, is more than holding right opinions or having "good values," but is a binding up of heart and mind that both frees us from enslaving passions and frees us for fine and beautiful deeds. How encouraging it is to read an account of human life—the only such account in our philosophical tradition—that speaks at length and profoundly about friendship, culminating in the claim that the most fulfilling form of friendship is the sharing of speeches and thoughts."

"Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Aristotle's teaching concerns the goals of ethical conduct. Unlike the moralists, Aristotle does not say that morality is a thing of absolute worth or that the virtuous person acts in order to adhere to a moral rule or universalizable maxim. And unlike the utilitarians, he does not say morality is good because it contributes to civic peace or to private gain and reputation. Instead, Aristotle says over and over again that the ethically excellent human being acts for the sake of the noble, for the sake of the beautiful. The human being of fine character seeks to display his own fineness in word and in deed, to show the harmony of his soul in action and the rightness of his choice in the doing of graceful and gracious deeds. The beauty of his action has less to do with the cause that his action will serve or the additional benefits that will accrue to himself or another — though there usually will be such benefits. It has, rather, everything to do with showing forth in action the beautiful soul at work, exactly as a fine dancer dances for the sake of dancing finely. As the ballerina both exploits and resists the downward pull of gravity to rise freely and gracefully above it, so the person of ethical virtue exploits and elevates the necessities of our embodied existence to act freely and gracefully above them. Fine conduct is the beautiful and intrinsically fulfilling being-at-work of the harmonious or excellent soul."

"With his attractive picture of human flourishing, Aristotle offers lasting refuge against the seas of moral relativism. Taking us on a tour of the museum of the virtues — from courage and moderation, through liberality, magnificence, greatness of soul, ambition, and gentleness, to the social virtues of friendliness, truthfulness, and wit — and displaying each of their portraits as a mean between two corresponding vices, ­Aristotle gives us direct and immediate experience in seeing the humanly beautiful. Anyone who cannot see that courage is more beautiful than cowardice or rashness, or that liberality is more beautiful than miserliness or prodigality, suffers, one might say, from the moral equivalent of color-blindness."

"To act nobly, a noble heart is not enough. It needs help from a sharp mind. Though the beginnings of ethical virtue lie in habituation, starting in our youth, and though the core of moral virtue is the right-shaping of our loves and hates, by means of praise and blame, reward and punishment, the perfection of character finally requires a certain perfection of the mind."

"Prudence is … more than mere shrewdness. If not tied down to the noble and just ends that one has been habituated to love, the soul's native power of cleverness can lead to the utmost knavery."

"I have discovered in the Hebrew Bible teachings of righteousness, humaneness, and human dignity—at the source of my parents' teachings of mentschlichkeit—undreamt of in my prior philosophizing. In the idea that human beings are equally God-like, equally created in the image of the divine, I have seen the core principle of a humanistic and democratic politics, respectful of each and every human being, and a necessary correction to the uninstructed human penchant for worshiping brute nature or venerating mighty or clever men. In the Sabbath injunction to desist regularly from work and the flux of getting and spending, I have discovered an invitation to each human being, no matter how lowly, to step outside of time, in imitatio Dei, to contemplate the beauty of the world and to feel gratitude for its—and our—existence. In the injunction to honor your father and your mother, I have seen the foundation of a dignified family life, for each of us the nursery of our humanization and the first vehicle of cultural transmission. I have satisfied myself that there is no conflict between the Bible, rightly read, and modern science, and that the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis offers "not words of information but words of appreciation," as Abraham Joshua Heschel put it: "not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world's having come into being"—the recognition of which glory, I would add, is ample proof of the text's claim that we human beings stand highest among the creatures. And thanks to my Biblical studies, I have been moved to new attitudes of gratitude, awe, and attention. For just as the world as created is a world summoned into existence under command, so to be a human being in that world—to be a mentsch—is to live in search of our ­summons. It is to recognize that we are here not by choice or on account of merit, but as an undeserved gift from powers not at our disposal. It is to feel the need to justify that gift, to make something out of our indebtedness for the opportunity of existence. It is to stand in the world not only in awe of its and our existence but under an obligation to answer a call to a worthy life, a life that does honor to the special powers and possibilities—the divine-likeness—with which our otherwise animal existence has been, no thanks to us, endowed."

"The purpose of this book is to discuss and present evidence for the general thesis that the flow of energy through a system acts to organize that system."

"While no one is going to make a decision on abortion purely on scientific grounds, we feel that everyone, at the very least, ought to get the facts straight."

"This type of answer is profoundly unsatisfying, but it’s about all you can expect if you ask the wrong question."

"Because of the importance of the Judeo-Christian tradition in America, it is important to understand abortion as dealt with in the Old Testament. The most significant fact is that it is never mentioned."

"All forms of life are related to each other, and the basic mechanisms that drive all of them are the same."

"The fact that both you and the amoeba use these universal molecules in your energy metabolism is as striking an example of the relatedness of life as can be found."

"At the chemical level, human beings just aren’t all that different from pumpkins or any other life forms."

"We recognize that to many people such a statement of cold biological fact misses something essential about the developing fetus. We recognize that there is a strong inclination to assign personhood or a soul to the single cell that results from fertilization on the grounds that it represents “potential life.” Our position is that this inclination, as strongly as it may be favored on religious or social grounds, has no basis in science because, as we point out in Chapter 1, personhood and soul are simply not scientific concepts."

"The end point of this reasoning is that any policy based on assigning a unique status to conception in the emergence of humanness must be seen as coming from subjective evaluations—evaluations that may not be shared by others. Subjectivity does not, of course, does not make these arguments wrong; it simply means that they cannot be given the kind of public universality we assign to arguments grounded in scientific understanding."

"Even with this abbreviated sketch of the process of fertilization, one thing is obvious. When biologists object to statements about life beginning at conception, they are not splitting hairs or being pedantic. There is no time in the sequence we’ve just described where new life is created. In fact, from the point of view of the biologist, at conception, two previously existing living things come together to form another living thing."

"The net result is that slightly fewer than a third of all conceptions lead to a fetus that has a chance of developing. In other words, if you were to choose a zygote at random and follow it through the first week of development, the chances are less than one in three that it would still be there at full term, even though there has been no human intervention. Nature, it seems, performs abortions at a much higher rate than any human society. It is simply not true that most zygotes, if undisturbed, will produce a human being."

"Decisions cannot be made on purely scientific grounds. We can, however, use scientific information to guide our moral and political judgments. No matter which side of the debate we take in any public dispute, we should, at a minimum, get the facts straight and understand the scientific dimensions of the problem."

"It is clearly in the best interests of everyone involved that these decisions be made with a maximum of compassion, a minimum of bureaucratic intervention, and the absence of attorneys."

"In the end, the abortion controversy comes down to one question: Will this particular pregnancy be terminated or not? There are only two possible choices, neither good. One is to abort the fetus. The other is to demand that the pregnancy be brought to term and, in effect, to compel the birth of an unwanted child. The second choice is repugnant to me. Not only does it entail real and immediate risks for the mother, but it may create a lifetime of misery for the child – misery that will, in all likelihood, persist for generations. Frankly, I can imagine fewer human acts more deeply evil than bringing an unwanted child into the world."

"I was a bookish kid. I spent long hours in the library reading everything I could find, histories, biographies, science fiction, fantasy, mysteries. I was curious about the world and there’s no better way to find things out than through the pages of a book. Even today if some kid asks me what’s the first step to take to become a doctor, I answer, “Read, read, read.”"

"I was in my teens when our family faced a medical crisis. My grandfather, with whom I was very close, had a stroke and landed in the hospital. Sitting anxiously at his bedside, I watched nurses come and go, checking his vitals and looking at the monitors attached to his body. I remember sitting there wondering what could I do to make him feel better—to bring back the warm, thoughtful man I knew."

"It was the neurosurgeons who fascinated me. When they explained what they could do surgically to help, I thought, I want to be like them. I want to know what they know and have the ability to heal like they do. Eventually my grandfather got better, and my path in life was started."

"Experts say we are "due" for one. When it happens, they tell us, it will probably have a greater impact on humanity than anything else currently happening in the world. And yet, like with most people, it is probably something you haven't spent much time thinking about. After all, it is human nature to avoid being consumed by hypotheticals until they are staring us squarely in the face. Such is the case with a highly lethal flu pandemic. And when it comes, it will affect every human alive today."

"flu is apolitical and does not discriminate between rich and poor. Geographical boundaries are meaningless, and it can circle the globe within hours. In terms of potential impact on mankind, the only thing that comes close is climate change. And, like climate change, pandemic flu is so vast, it can be challenging to wrap your head around it."

"When most people hear "flu," they typically think of . No doubt, seasonal flu can be deadly, especially for the very young and old, as well as those with compromised immune systems. For most people, however, the seasonal flu virus, which mutates just a little bit every year, is not particularly severe because our immune systems have already probably seen a similar flu virus and thus know how to fight it. It's called native immunity or protection, and almost all of us have some degree of it. Babies are more vulnerable because they haven't been exposed to the seasonal flu and older people because their immune systems may not be functioning as well. Pandemic flu is a different animal, and you should understand the difference."

"Panˈdemik/: pan means "all"; demic (or demographic) means "people." It is well-named, because pandemic flu spreads easily throughout the world. Unlike seasonal flu, pandemics occur when a completely new or emerges. This sort of virus can emerge directly from animal reservoirs or be the result of a dramatic series of mutations -- so-called events -- in previously circulating viruses. In either case, the result is something mankind has never seen before: a that can spread easily from person to defenseless person, our immune systems never primed to launch any sort of defense."

"“A Streptichron (from the Classical Greek meaning to 'bend time') is an active packet facilitating prediction that implements any of the active mechanisms... The Streptichron can use this capability to refine its prediction as it travels through the network.”"

"“Often it seems the more ‘scholarship’ one has, the less innovative one becomes. One can increasingly rest upon their knowledge of prior art to solve what looks like a new problem.”"

"“Academics tend to think they are each the next Einstein whose ‘creativity’ will finally be uncovered a hundred years from now. That's when society should deliver their project funding.”"

"“I like to be innovative in everything, including innovation.”"

"“Contrary to popular opinion, innovation without some standardized conceptual framework is tantamount to chaos.”"

"“Richard Feynman presciently stated... that ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’. ...within this vast room … there will be a requirement for communication.”"

"“Let us think of standards as a way to move from publication to innovation, to move from trying to increase a meaningless impact factor to actually having an impact and fostering new ideas that people can build upon.”"

"“In a sense, both the power grid and communications have suffered from their own respective successes – the electric power grid tends to be taken for granted and communication networks are assumed to work perfectly under almost any condition and for any application...the manner in which they are integrated will have far-reaching consequences.”"

"“...understanding information entropy in the power grid per kilowatt of power delivered or the radio frequency communication power expended within the power grid per kilowatt of power delivered will be more valuable than understanding the detailed packet structure of a half-dozen supervisory control and data acquisition protocols.”"

"“Conceptually, we would like a `Maxwell's demon' to exist within the power grid capable of capturing the geomagnetic storm energy. This could someday be a new feature of the `smart grid.'”"

"“The advantage of molecular messaging over other sorts of communication, he says, is its ability to be deployed in hard-to-reach places, such as providing in-body communications for medical applications. The body’s cellular signalling pathways have already been mapped, so these could serve as “communications channels”, says Dr Bush. Digital signals could be sent, say, to the vagal system to help moderate a patient’s blood pressure or heart rate. Data transmitted molecularly might also enable blood-sugar levels to be monitored without invasive pinpricks.”"

"“Nanotechnology has been a very promising research topic in recent years, leading to successful practical implementations. The achievements in this area have led to a growing interest in nanoscale networks. Nanoscale Communication Networks is a kind of primer which prepares the reader for the convergence of Nanotechnology and networking, providing the necessary information for further reading or self-research.”"

"“No prior knowledge regarding quantum mechanics is expected, so one can find a really good introduction covering quantum states, measurement, entanglement together with other aspects of quantum networking, including such issues as security, teleportation, and channel swapping.”"

"“Having presented all the relevant nanoscale mechanisms, thus laying down a firm background for the readers’ understanding, the author moves to the topic of architectural challenges in Chapter 7. This field is claimed still to be an unsolved problem so the author gives examples of currently used technologies and points out potential architectural solutions such as self-assembly, carbon nanotubes, or quantum systems. That is why it makes the book even more valuable for those who intend to involve nanonetworks in their research.”"

"“Summing up, Nanoscale Communication Networks is a demanding but also very interesting book, an ambitious primer. It is definitely a good starting point for further reading. The author guides the reader through all the aspects of nanonetworks, giving in most cases a clear description of his thinking process within transitions between equations. There are also many cross references between chapters and sections which give a broader view of the topic and help to memorize it. One can also find many pictures, diagrams and tables throughout this book in order to systematize the presented knowledge.”"

"“Another advantage is the existence of an exercise section at the end of each chapter which enables the reader to verify understanding and, when needed, to go back to the right section and reread desired fragments.”"

"“...Nanoscale Communication Networks is a very good and valuable book.”"

"“There is a gap between industry and academia. Industry views academia as publication-focused: self-centered, lacking innovation, unaware of IP. Academia views industry as money-focused: driven by the bottom-line, innovating too quickly, product-focused. I would like to see more input from industry and emphasis on understanding 'innovation' to close this gap.”"

"Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it."

"There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living."

"The world stands aside to let anyone pass who knows where he is going."

"Far away in the thirties and forties she (the girl you want to be) is waiting her turn. Her body, brain, her soul are in your girlish hands. She cannot help herself. What will you leave for her? … Will you throw away her inheritance?"

"In 1910 our attention was turned to what seemed a possibly useful educational effort against war, inaugurated at Stanford University by its president, David Starr Jordan. I knew Dr. Jordan slightly. His argument for opening the channels of world trade in the interest of peace had helped keep up my spirits when laboring against the tariff lobbies that so effectively closed them."

"During the 1950s and 1960s most of the work which was called cybernetics tended to focus on control systems in engineering or on applications of the concept of feedback in fields ranging from mathematics to sociology. At the 1970 meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics in Philadelphia Heinz von Foerster sought to redirect attention to the original interests which had led to the founding of the field of cybernetics. In a paper titled "Cybernetics of Cybernetics" he made a distinction between first order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observed systems, and second order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observing systems."

"The "second order cyberneticians" claimed that knowledge is a biological phenomenon (Maturana, 1970), that each individual constructs his or her own "reality" (Foerster, 1973) and that knowledge "fits" but does not "match" the world of experience (von Glasersfeld, 1987)."

"Systems science is generally said to have emerged during and after World War II, although there were precursors to the basic ideas. The people who created each school of thought were working largely independently, although many of them knew each other. They came from different disciplines, they were working on different problems, they formulated different variations of the principles of systems and cybernetics, and they often chose to affiliate with different academic societies."

"A key location for the development of general systems theory was the University of Michigan’s Mental Health Research Institute (MHRI) where General Systems, the yearbook of the (SGSR) was based for many years. A mental health research institute may seem a peculiar place to find systems theory."

"A group that was somewhat connected with general systems theory is usually associated with the term, the systems approach. They were located originally at the University of Pennsylvania. They later went to Case Western Reserve University and then back to the University of Pennsylvania. Their founding philosopher was E. A. Singer, Jr. One of Singer's students was C. West Churchman, and Churchman's first student was Russell Ackoff."

"Another tradition in systems theory, known as system dynamics, originated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The founder of this tradition was Jay Forrester, a creative engineer who invented the magnetic core memory for computers and who built the , which is now in the Smithsonian Institution."

"Another group at MIT and Harvard University developed the notion of “organizational learning.” Chris Argyris and Donald Schön were the key figures in this group. Argyris was a student of Kurt Lewin, who was a participant in the Macy Foundation meetings that were chaired by Warren McCulloch."

"Biochemistry asks how the remarkable properties of living organisms arise from the thousands of different biomolecules."

"Organisms possess extraordinary attributes, properties that distinguish them from other collections of matter. What are these distinguishing features of living organisms?"

"Despite these common properties, and the fundamental unity of life they reveal, it is difficult to make generalizations about living organisms."

"The unity and diversity of organisms become apparent even at the cellular level."

"Cells of all kinds share certain structural features."

"The upper limit of cell size is probably set by the rate of diffusion of solute molecules in aqueous systems."

"All living organisms fall into one of three large groups (domains) [Bacteria, Archeara, Eukarya] that define three branches of evolution from a common progenitor."

"The distinguishing characteristics of eukary­otes are the nucleus and a variety of membrane-enclosed organelles with specific functions."

"The current understanding that all organisms share a common evolutionary origin is based in part on this observed universality of chemical intermediates and transformations, often termed "biochemical unity.""

"The chemistry of living organisms is organized around carbon, which accounts for more than half the dry weight of cells."

"We can consider cellular energy conversions—like all other energy conversions—in the context of the laws of thermodynamics."

"Virtually every chemical reaction in a cell occurs at a significant rate only because of the presence of enzymes."

"Perhaps the most remarkable property of living cells and organisms is their ability to reproduce themselves for countless generations with nearly perfect fidelity. This continuity of inherited traits implies constancy, over millions of years, in the structure of the molecules that contain the genetic information."

"Among the seminal discoveries in biology in the twentieth century were the chemical nature and the three-dimensional structure of the genetic material, deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA."

"The remarkable similarity of metabolic pathways and gene sequences across the phyla argues strongly that all modern organisms are derived from a common evolutionary progenitor by a series of small changes (mutations), each of which conferred a selective advantage to some organism in some ecological niche."

"The first living organisms on Earth doubtless arose in an aqueous environment, and the course of evolution has been shaped by the proper­ ties of the aqueous medium in which life began."

"As a result, there is an electrostatic attraction between the oxygen atom of one water molecule and the hydrogen of another (Fig. 2-lb), called a hydrogen bond."

"Water is a polar solvent. It readily dissolves most bio­ molecules, which are generally charged or polar com­ pounds (Table 2-2); compounds that dissolve easily in water are hydrophilic (Greek, "water-loving"). In contrast, nonpolar solvents such as chloroform and benzene are poor solvents for polar biomolecules but easily dis­ solve those that are hydrophobic-nonpolar molecules such as lipids and waxes."

"In thermodynamic terms, formation of the solution occurs with a fa vorable free-energy change: ΔG = ΔH - TΔS, where ΔH has a small positive value and TΔS a large positive value; thus ΔG is negative."

"New heuristic (1) is used to prefer revision to premises that support relatively weak generalized beliefs."

"In recent years, researchers have made considerable progress on the of inductive learning tasks, but for theoretical results to have impact on practice, they must deal with the average case. In this paper we present an average-case analysis of a simple algorithm that induces one-level decision trees for concepts defined by a single relevant attribute. Given knowledge about the number of training instances, the number of irrelevant attributes, the amount of class and attribute noise, and the class and attribute distributions, we derive the expected classification accuracy over the entire instance space. We then examine the predictions of this analysis for different settings of these domain parameters, comparing them to experimental results to check our reasoning."

"Science is a seamless web: each idea spins out to a new research task, and each research finding suggests a repair or an elaboration of the network of theory. Most of the links connecting the nodes are short, each attaching to its predecessors. Weaving our way through the web, we stop from time to time to rest and survey the view — and to write a paper or a book."

"In the scientist’s house are many mansions... Outsiders often regard science as a sober enterprise, but we who are inside see it as the most romantic of all callings. Both views are right. The romance adheres to the processes of scientific discovery, the sobriety to the responsibility for verification..."

"BACON.4 does not have heuristics for considering trigonometric functions of variables directly . Thus, in the run described here we simply told the system to examine the sines. In the following chapter we will see how BACON can actually arrive at the sine term on its own in a rather subtle manner."

"In all of these cases, the error arose from accepting “loose” fits of a law to data, and the later, correct formulation provided a law that fit the data much more closely. If we wished to simulate this phenomenon with BACON, we would only have to set the error allowance generously at the outset, then set stricter limits after an initial law had been found."

"As aims to address larger, more complex tasks, the problem of focusing on the most relevant information in a potentially overwhelming quantity of data has become increasingly important."

"Given a sample of data S, a learning algorithm L, and a feature set A, feature xi , is incrementally useful to L with respect to A if the accuracy of the hypothesis that L produces using the feature set {xi} ∪ A is better than the accuracy achieved using just the feature set A."

"A cognitive architecture specifies aspects of an intelligent system that are stable over time, much as in a building’s architecture. These include the memories that store perceptions, beliefs, and knowledge, the representation of elements that are contained in these memories, the performance mechanisms that use them, and the learning processes that build on them. Such a framework typically comes with a programming language and software environment that supports the efficient construction of knowledge-based systems."

"Research on cognitive architectures varies widely in the degree to which it attempts to match psychological data. ACT-R (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) and EPIC (Kieras & Meyer, 1997) aim for quantitative fits to reaction time and error data, whereas Prodigy (Minton et al., 1989) incorporates selected mechanisms like means-ends analysis but otherwise makes little contact with human behavior. Architectures like Soar (Laird, Newell, & Rosenbloom, 1987; Newell, 1990) and Icarus (Langley & Choi, in press; Langley & Rogers, 2005) take a middle position, drawing on many psychological ideas but also emphasizing their strength as flexible AI systems. What they hold in common is an acknowledgement of their debt to theoretical concepts from cognitive psychology and a concern with the same intellectual abilities as humans."

"Surrogate percept, allowing people to detect some pattern or property in a remembered scene that they did not encode explicitly when they saw the scene initially."

"Perceptual interpretive processes are applied to mental images in much the same way that they are applied to actual physical objects. In this sense, imagined objects can be "interpreted" much like physical objects."

"The image discoveries which then ’emerge’ resemble the way perceptual discoveries can follow the active exploration and manipulation of physical objects."

"Restricting the ways in which creative cognition are interpreted encourages creative exploration and discovery and further reduces the likelihood that a person will fall back on conventional lines of thought."

"Finke et al. (1992) proposed a cognitive model of creative thinking called geneplore, a name that emphasizes the importance of generative and exploratory phases of the creative process. In the generative phase, one uses processes such as retrieval, analogical transfer, or mental transformation to construct representations of ideas that may take various forms such as visual patterns, verbal combinations, or mental models. These initial ideas, referred to as preinventive forms, ideally have properties such as novelty, meaningfulness, and emergent qualities. Exploratory processes can then be used to develop the initially generated ideas for specific purposes."

"Since the 1980's, we have been concerned about acceptable risk, but I believe that we have now entered the era of acceptable uncertainty."

"Moral relativism is an easy and sloppy way to deal with personhood."

"Scientific advances can wreak havoc with social values. What appears to be advanced thinking at times turns out to be retrograde attempts at dehumanization. Advances in technology can be used to commoditize human beings. Genetic fetal testing, for example, can be used to screen against the "unfit"."

"I believe synthetic biology forces society into the chaos of ethics. And, I believe that every connotation of "chaos" applies to the ethics of synthetic biology. Researchers must decide if a particular endeavor is ethical because, of course, mistakes can result due to the unpredictability of these very complex systems. I also believe that the original Greek and the Genesis, Chapter 1, understanding of formlessness applies, since scientists are trying to move to the simplest creatures possible, so-called "chassis bacteria", onto which they can add desirable traits at their choosing. Finally, I believe that the mathematical connotation of chaos applies, since even the most simple living creature is a dynamical system that is highly sensitive to initial conditions. I sometimes wonder about the extent to which those most intimately involved and those strongly advocating synthetic biology think about this."

"You often hear that the language of science is mathematics. I don't completely agree with the article. I don't think it is a definite article. Mathematics is "a" language of science. But, it is only "a" language of science. The language of science is English. The language of science is Spanish."

"Humility is fundamental in science. I recall during an update meeting with my PhD committee at Duke saying that I thought I would be ready to defend my dissertation in May. The unflappable engineering professor, Aarne Vesilind, said he agreed, but year was I talking about?"

"Scientists are not known for the graces of courtesy and tact when commenting on the work of others."

"If speaking to nonscientific audiences is something that interests you or will likely be asked of you, keep in mind three overriding requirements: first, you must be a human being, an interesting one if at all possible; second, you must be accurate in what you say, that is, tell the truth (about what is known and what isn't; about issues, debates, controversies); and third, if your subject is scientific knowledge, you must remain a scientist and not slip into the role of advocate or activist."

"How many talks have you sat through where the researcher qua [as] person just didn't show up: no anecdotes, no personal details, no emotion or enthusiasm, no humor (intentional, that is), no real contact with the audience – in other words, no performance. [...] They may satisfy the second two requirements mentioned above – accuracy and nonadvocacy – but they fail in the first and, in some ways, the most important."

"[The] enormous appetite for animal products has forced the conversion (at a very poor rate) of more and more grain, soybean and even fish meal into feed for cattle, hogs and poultry, thus decreasing the amounts of food directly available for direct consumption by the poor."

"[Vegetarianism] has three things going for it all at once—economics, health and compassion."

"Quite often the young person is horrified at innocent animals being driven to the slaughterhouse to satisfy the appetites of the human species which could easily feed itself in other ways."

"In becoming a vegetarian, you will eat a greater percentage of your calories from cereal grains, dried beans and peas, potatoes and pasta—the very foods most dieters avoid with zeal. And you will lose weight."

"A small, bespectacled man who became an American citizen after the war but never lost his French accent or Gallic jauntiness, Dr. Mayer (pronounced my-YAIR), was a perfect blend of European intellectual and American pragmatist: a charming, talkative, often stubborn educator who pushed the frontiers of knowledge in the laboratory and fought hunger and malnutrition wherever they flourished."

"Two of the major questions left unanswered by the Standard Model of particle physics have to do with hierarchies of mass scales. The first is the problem: what determines the masses of the s and s, and why do they span such a large range, e.g. why is the top quark 3 × 105 times heavier than the electron? The second is the gauge hierarchy problem: why is the weak scale seventeen orders of magnitude smaller than the ?"

"... for almost as long as people have been anticipating ... thinking about , the prime candidate for new physics, beyond the , ... has been supersymmetry."

"There are still many open questions that need answering: Why does gravity defy the notion of space-time in short distances? Why are there humongous quantum fluctuations in shorter distances? How is a larger Universe possible? These questions relate to the hierarchy problem and fine tuning and are divided into two stages. First, one should ask: “Why is there a macroscopic Universe that is not broken in the Planck scale,” and second: “Why are there large scale structures in the large Universe and they are not broken into Planck scale black holes?”"

"The stakes are higher than the past. We aren’t asking about this or that particle, but something much more deeply structural about physical reality. … By far the best way to settle this question is to lead a charge to the highest possible energies and build a 100-TeV collider."

"The hierarchy problem is the elephant in the room. ... And it originally showed up in the context of doublet–triplet splitting problem."

"This is the best few tens of billions years in the history of the universe to do cosmology."

"Whether in physics and mathematics or in the humanities, when something really finally works, it has a certain perfection to it, a feeling of inevitability, like it was so completely obvious all along, and it couldn't be any other way."

"... like most physicists, I really enjoy talking about physics."

"... nature has very few good ideas — it recycles them in subtle and interesting ways, over and over again — and it's our job to understand how that works."

"China must have realized the epidemic did not originate in that Wuhan Huanan seafood market. The presumed rapid spread of the (COVID-19) virus apparently for the first time from the Huanan seafood market in December (2019) did not occur. Instead, the virus was already silently spreading in Wuhan, hidden amid many other patients with pneumonia at this time of year. The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace."

"There's still no road map for what you do to make a vaccine in the midst of a devastating public health outbreak."

"The reason why we have this situation now with Omicron... is we allowed large unvaccinated populations in low- and middle-income countries to remain unvaccinated. Delta arose out of an unvaccinated population in India in early 2021, and Omicron out of a large unvaccinated population on the African continent later in the same year. So, these two variants of concern represent failures, failures by global leaders to work with sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America to vaccinate the Southern Hemisphere, vaccinate the Global South.... myself...Dr. Bottazzi... and our team of 20 scientists... make vaccines for diseases that the pharma companies won’t make... the only thing we know how to do is make low-cost, straightforward vaccines for use in resource-poor settings... it was very difficult to get funding. We got no support from Operation Warp Speed, no support really from the G7 countries... now we’ve licensed our prototype vaccine, and help in the co-development, to India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and now Botswana.... it’s really exciting to show that, you know, you don’t need to be a multinational pharmaceutical company and just make brand-new technologies that will only be suitable for the Northern Hemisphere. We can really make a vaccine for the world."

"We invite scientists from all over the world to come into our vaccine labs to learn how to make vaccines under a quality umbrella, whereas you cannot walk into Merck or GSK or Pfizer or Moderna and say, “Show me how to make a vaccine.” With our group, we can.... the biggest frustration was never really getting that support from the G7 countries... I going on cable news networks... trying to raise meager funds just to get started... fortunately, we were able to get some funding through Texas- and New York-based philanthropies, and...we raised about...$7 million...with that, we were able to pay our scientists to actually do this, transfer the technology, no patent, no strings attached, to India, now, as I said, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Botswana... we’ve been getting calls for help all over the world from ministries of science and ministries of health, and we do what we can. We could do a lot — I mean, if we had even a fraction of the support that, say, Moderna or the other pharma companies had gotten, who knows? We might have been able to have the whole world vaccinated by now.... It’s even a vegan vaccine... So, now our partners in Indonesia... are trying to do this as a halal vaccine for Muslim-majority countries, which is pretty exciting, as well."

"In 2006, I became founding editor in chief of PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, a then new journal for a growing community of scientists and public health officials committed to studying the (NTDs). ...I became deeply impressed with the number of papers reporting on disease findings in middle-income countries, and even in some high-income countries. This... combined with my personal experiences after moving to Texas and seeing first-hand the endemic tropical diseases, inspired me to look more deeply into the health disparities of the poor who live in the midst of wealth. ...Many of the findings in this book are based on data and information published in [the journal]."

"In 2011, together with a team of 15 scientists, I relocated to Houston, Texas, to launch a new school devoted to poverty-related diseases. The National School of Tropical Medicine at is a joint venture among three biomedical institutions—Baylor, , and the —with a mission devoted to research on and training in the treatment of neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs..."

"Today, the NTDs represent the most common afflictions of people who live in extreme poverty. These ailments include diseases such as hookworm, , , and —or... the most important diseases you've never heard of. Virtually every impoverished individual is infected with at least one NTD."

"Baylor's National School of Tropical Medicine... includes as its research arm a... product development partnership (PDP). There are 16 PDPs worldwide... international nonprofit organizations that develop and manufacture s—drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines—for NTDs, as well as for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria. Together, the NTDs, Tb, and malaria are sometimes broadly defined as "neglected diseases." PDPs develop and test new products for neglected diseases that the major pharmaceutical companies may not have an interest in because they are poverty-related afflictions that will therefor not generate significant sales income. The National School of Tropical Medicine's PDP is known as the PDP, and it is specifically focused on developing NTD vaccines."

"One reason... to move our scientists to Houston was to take advantage of being located within the [TMC]... comprising more than 50 biomedical institutions and 100,000 employees, occupying a building space that exceeds that of downtown Los Angeles. A second reason... generous support from Texas Children's Hospital (the world's largest...) which also housed the Sabin Vaccine Institute PDP... Our goal for moving and becoming linked to the TMC was to increase the number of new vaccines we are creating for the poorest people in less developed countries, [and] to accelerate the pace at which they are produced. ...[T]oday we have two vaccines in clinical trials—with others in various stages of development."

"[I]n Houston (and elsewhere in Texas) is an area known as the Fifth Ward... Driving... deep into this neighborhood reminded me of the terrible poverty I had seen... in destitute areas of Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, and China. I saw... images... just like the standard global disease movie typically shown to first-year public health or medical students. ...It was even more astonishing when we turned our global health lens inward to study diseases that were infecting impoverished areas... [W]e found widespread NTDs... in Texas and elsewhere in the southern United States. ...NTDs are first and foremost diseases of acute poverty. ...[W]e determined that 12 million Americans who live at such poverty levels suffer from at least one NTD. The diseases include neglected parasitic infections such as , , , and ."

"Today, measles ranks among the most deadly of childhood infections, yet parents and guardians are walking away from protecting their children against this and other deadly diseases in unprecedented numbers. They are abandoning the option of protecting their children because of phony propaganda released by an anti-vaccine movement that began in 1968. Since then, the movement has become scary, powerful, and well organized. One aspiration of this book is to counter [those] claims... that MMR (measles, mumps-rubella) and other childhood vaccines are either unsafe or cause autism."

"[V]accines are safe and cannot possibly cause autism..."

"I perceive... a dearth of voices speaking out against the modern anti-vaccination movement. Their false claims and public statements more often than not go unchallenged. I hope that this book might serve as a clarion call for other scientists and physicians to speak out on behalf of science."

"There is an urgency to create vaccines for diseases which don't make money."

"[W]e took this on... with the idea of pioneering not only interest in science, but also a new business model, and the business model part, we haven't quite figured out yet, because we're trying to make... vaccines for diseases no one else will make."

"So we have a vaccine now in clinical trials, a vaccine that we hope will advance to the clinic soon, a Hookworm vaccine in clinical trials, a new vaccine that's moving into the clinic. I like to say that these are the most important diseases that you've never heard of. These are some of the most common afflictions of the world's population, but they mostly occur among people who live in extreme poverty... [S]o there is no model to figure out who's going to pay for them. So as a consequence, neither the biotechs nor the big pharmaceutical companies make those vaccines."

"[W]e also took on, a decade ago, the interesting problem of making Coronavirus vaccines because we recognized these as enormous public health threats, and yet we have not seen the big pharma guys and the biotech's rushing into this space. So we... partnered with a group at the and the to take on the big scientific challenge of Coronavirus vaccines..."

"[O]ne of the things that we're not hearing a lot about is the unique potential safety problem of Coronavirus vaccines. ...This was first found in the early 1960s with the respiratory syncytial virus [RSV] vaccines, and it was done here in Washington with the NIH and Children's National Medical Center... [S]ome of those kids that got the vaccine actually did worse, and I believe that there were two deaths in the consequence of that study. ...[W]hat happens with certain types of respiratory virus vaccines, you get immunized, and then when you get actually exposed to the virus you get this kind of paradoxical immune enhancement phenomenon. ...[I]t's a real problem for certain respiratory virus vaccines. That killed the RSV program for decades. Now the Gates Foundation is taking it up again, but when we started developing Coronavirus vaccines (and our colleagues) we noticed in laboratory animals, that they started to show some of the same immune pathology that resembled what had happened 50 years earlier."

"But we collaborated with a unique group that figured out how to solve the problem. That if you narrow it down to the smallest subunit, the piece that... [is] called the receptor binding domain, that docs with the receptor, you get protection, and you don't get that immune enhancement phenomenon. ...We proposed this to the . They funded it and we wound up actually making and manufacturing, in collaboration with , a first generation SARS vaccine. So SARS was the one that emerged in 2003... and then this new one... we call the SARS 2 Coronavirus. We had it manufactured, but then we could never get the investment to take it beyond that. ...We had the vaccine ready to go, but we couldn't move it into the clinic, because of lack of funding, because by then nobody was interested in Coronavirus vaccines."

"When the Chinese started putting up the data on Bioarchive in January-February, we saw a very close homology between the two, and realized that we may be sitting on a very attractive Coronavirus vaccine. Now, we're working... again with NIH, and we're working with BARDA and others to get the funding, but now we'll have that lag. ...[T]hese clinical trials are not going to go that quickly because of that immune enhancement. It's going to take time. ...[U]nfortunsately, some of my colleagues in the biotech industry are making these inflated claims. ...[Y]ou've seen this... in the newspapers, "We're going to have this vaccine in weeks..." What they're really seeing is that they can move a vaccine into clinical trials, but this will not go quickly because as we start vaccinating human volunteers, especially in areas where we have community transmission, we're going to have to proceed very slowly, very cautiously. The FDA is on top of that. They have a great team in place at the . They're aware of the problem, but it's not going to go quickly. We are going to have to follow this very slowly, cautiously, to make certain that we're not seeing that immune enhancement. So now we're hearing projections, a year, 18 months, who knows..."

"[H]ad we had those investments early on, to carry this all the way through clinical trials years ago, we could have had a vaccine ready to go."

"So we've got to figure out what the ecosystem is going to be, to develop vaccines that are not going to make money."

"The big pharma companies are still not going in. Some of the biotechs are starting to, because they're trying to really accelerate their technology... and hopefully to flip it around for something else that will make money. We need a new system in place."

"My friend Dr. Peter Hotez is the world's leading authority on battling tropical diseases. Worried about Zika, Ebola, , , malaria—he is your man. ...He has tangled with the disgraced former British doctor , who promulgated a false causal link between vaccines and autism that led to many preventable cases of measles and other diseases... Hotez does this while bearing the price of threatening, hateful e-mails and tweets from Wakefield's supporters who... keep up the vaccine-autism myth despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary."

"Peter Hotez and his wife, Ann, have an autistic daughter, Rachel. ...[W]hen anti-vaccinators impugn vaccines as the cause of autism, they... pay close attention. A man who has spent his career fighting , sometimes with vaccines, is going to be especially and appropriately concerned when vaccines are flagged over and over again as the cause of his own daughter's health issues."

"Now, with the latest findings of Dr. Peter Hortez, we realize that there's a new dimension to extreme poverty. ...[A]nywhere where wealthy people live... Peter finds an astonishing but mostly hidden level of poverty and suffering. He has discovered that most of the poverty-related diseases... NTDs, actually occur in the wealthiest countries and economies. ...Peter's framework... "blue marble health," means that the NTDs will be found regardless of location as long as there are places or regions where people live in desperate circumstances. ...Peter finds that if the elected leaders of the most powerful nations would simply recognize and support their own impoverished and neglected populations, a majority of our most ancient and terrible scourges could vanish. ...Currently more than a billion people live with no money and suffer from horrific NTDs. ...This must be fixed."

"If you reduce the amount of , the level in the atmosphere goes down fairly quickly, within decades, as opposed to CO2, if you reduce the emissions to the atmosphere, you don’t really see a signal in the atmosphere for a hundred years or so. […] I had an invite to a meeting with Al Gore, some years ago now, and made these methane arguments, and he was really pushback. That’s just his argument, “It’s hard enough to get people to think about CO2. Don’t confuse them.” […] Some people say, “Well, let’s fix CO2, and then we can worry about methane.” Well, that’s the wrong. It’s the other way around that actually makes sense. Do something about methane, because you’ll get a response right away."

"“Our investment in prevention and research is an investment in our nations … it all depends on healthy people, the result of our knowledge must be prevention. If we trust treatment without an investment in prevention, then we have failed.”"

"He epitomizedeverything a Berkeley professor should be: visionary and innovative, but always focusing onhelping those who were poor and disenfranchised."

"The vast majority of India’s poor rely on daily for sustenance. With the current lockdown and its likely extension, millions of daily labourers and their families can no longer earn the money they need to survive. In this unprecedented situation, the Indian state must respond swiftly to prevent widespread acute hunger. [...] The health and economic threats posed by the pandemic are unprecedented: India must capitalise upon its preparedness to address food insecurity and prioritise food distribution to protect the health and welfare of its most vulnerable citizens."

"There are approximately two billion cells in the nervous system of a human being. The process of thinking in any individual is partly dependent upon the variable arrangement of these cells. Therefore no person can think exactly as another, any more than he can change his facial features to duplicate the facial features of another. If people would remember this fact and regulate their attitudes towards others to conform to it, it would encourage the exercise of tolerance, the human attribute most needed today."

"In a life-long partnership with his wife Jessie, James Grier Miller contributed substantially to the development of and to the integration of disciplines through general systems theory, remaining actively engaged in these areas throughout his working life. From his early work on the human brain in the 1940s, Miller worked for over 60 years within influential circles to foster a wide range of new endeavours. In 1949, as Chair of the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago, he founded the new field of behavioural science, devoted to the theoretical integration of the biological and social sciences, through the establishment of the influential Committee on Behavioral Science. In 1955, he got funding from the State of Michigan to set up the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan; and in 1967, he became President of the University Louisville where he established a Systems Science Institute. His comprehensive integration of the sciences, in Living Systems (1978), remains core to the study of Living Systems and many other fields of research and practice within the systems community."

"Anytime you do anything that has impact at all, you are not universally loved."

"I have a problem in living which century I live. When I read those manuscripts, I'm taken away there. Sometimes I'm totally taken with them, with the monks and the ancient libraries and the ancient monasteries and then, when someone passes by me in their office and speaks English, I say, "What?" But then I realize I am in an English-speaking world."

"Many people are more apt to conserve the things they know about than to conserve the things that are foreign to them. This flora will, I hope, acquaint at least a few more people with the plants around them and perhaps thus serve as a stimulus, however slight, toward more permanent protection of our environment."

"In the training of a number of us graduate students at Berkeley in the mid-'30's, the late estimable Professor K. F. Meyer told us of the concealment by the city fathers of San Francisco of an outbreak of human bubonic ("black") plague, concealment being in response to pressure of the city's business community which saw publication of plague's presence as a threat to business. It would scare away tourists and business travelers. Professor Meyer pointed out that groups with conflicts of interest, particularly groups which have a record of strongly materialistic behavior, do not characteristically think in the public interest in public health matters."

"is a currency that is involved in generating movement that's not coincidental and is involved in motivation and pursuit of particular rewards."

"I think the education system should start, in my opinion, with teaching kids how to understand themselves, what to do in difficult scenarios that's really anchored in the real pillars of biology and psychology, and trying to take some of the mystery out of trying to navigate the tough business of growing up."

"The other is that dog breeds w/different shaped heads are predictive of their demeanor and intelligence. And while I don’t! believe in Phrenology I now do pay some attention to how the shapes of peoples heads relates to their intellect and steadiness, or lack thereof."

"In 1895 the writer became interested in the study of the . Breeding-cage experiments with some detail later on in this paper early convinced him that is the favorite food of this species. Even in the presence of kitchen garbage, , and , flies in confinement oviposited exclusively on horse manure. In the absence of the latter substance but in the presence of the others, he noted egg-laying on decaying fruit and on cow dung but the resultant larvæ failed to develop. He considered himself warranted in the statement that probably 95 percent of the flies found in cities come from the piles of horse manure everywhere so prevalent, especially in the vicinity of stables."

"As is well known, the mosquito-pest is by no means confined to the tropics or even to temperate regions. The stories which the from and other Alaskan localities tell of the abundance and ferocity of Alaskan mosquitoes, are hardly to be matched by any mosquito story which I have heard, historical or otherwise. Many of my friends in the and the who have formed members of summer parties for survey work in Alaska, have come back to this country with a much stronger idea of the importance of the practical study of insects than they had when they started, their acquaintance with mosquitoes having become so intimate and their knowledge of their ferocity having reached such a pitch that the first question which they ask on returning is: "If I have to go up there next summer, what under the sun can I do to keep from being bled to death by mosquitoes?" They state that they never experienced or even imagined anything in the mosquito line quite equal to those found in Alaska. Mr. W. C. Henderson, of Philadelphia, says, concerning Alaskan mosquitoes, "They existed in countless millions, driving us to the verge of suicide or insanity.""

"For many centuries humanity has endured the annoyance of mosquitoes without making any intelligent effort to prevent it except in the use of smudges, preparations applied to the skin, and in removal from localities of abundance. And it is only within comparatively recent years that widespread community work against mosquitoes has been undertaken, this having resulted almost directly from the discoveries concerning the carriage of disease by these insects. As obvious a procedure as it might seem to be, the abolition of mosquito-breeding places is a comparatively new idea. The treatment of breeding places with oil to destroy the larval forms is, however, by no means recent. As early as 1812 the writer of a work published in London entitled "Omniana or Horæ Otiosiores" suggested that by pouring oil upon water the number of mosquitoes may be diminished. It is stated that in the middle of the nineteenth century was used in France in this way, while in the French quarter in oil was placed in water tanks before the , the idea having possibly come France to New Orleans or vice versa."

"was a resident of , and was greatly interested in the so-called of that city. The Institute had founded a museum that contained large collections in natural history brought home through the years by the famous Salem ships. Putnam induced his fellow students, , , , and to work at these collections, Morse on the shells, Packard on the , Hyatt on the s and on geology, and Putnam on the vertebrates and ethnology. Whether they went to Salem to live a year or so earlier or later, makes little difference, but, when gave the Institute $140,000 and the well known was founded in 1867, all of them but Verrill (who had gone to , were placed in definite charge of these subjects in the Museum."

"The early literature of has, from very remote times, contained allusions to huge species of s, often accompanied by more or less fabulous and usually exaggerated descriptions of the creatures ... In a few instances figures were attempted which were largely indebted to the imagination of their authors for their more striking peculiarities. In recent times, many more accurate observers have confirmed the existence of such monsters, and several fragments have found their way into European museums. To and to , however, belongs the credit of first describing and figuring, in a scientific manner, a number of fragments sufficient to give some idea of the real character and affinities of these colossal species."

"The following catalogue is intended to include all the now known to inhabit the that are not included in 's edition of 's Invertebrata of Massachusetts, published in 1870. In the "New England Region" I include, on the north, the coasts of Nova Scotia and , and their outlying banks; while on the south, I include the entire region, about 100 to 120 miles wide, between the shore and the , off the southern coast of New England, and embracing all depths down to 600 s. ... I have also included the free-swimming and floating forms, ordinarily inhabiting the same region, which may be considered as meeting and including the innermost edge of the Gulf Stream in summer, but most of these surface forms are usually to be found, in summer, far inside the actual limits of the Gulf Stream. The and the northern parts of the I have considered as extra-limital, for my present purposes. Those localities are inhabited by an extremely , including many species of mollusca that have not yet been found farther south. Among these are several species of ' and allied genera."

"On the first trip of the from , which was made July 16 to 19, four successful hauls were made with a large trawl, in 1,346 to 1,735 s, on the 17th and 18th of July, two each day, besides the soundings and temperature determinations, including series of temperatures at various distances from the surface. On this trip about one hundred and five species of s were obtained, not including the and other minute forms. There were among them fourteen species of ; two of s; twenty-two of s; thirty-eight of ; fifteen of ; one of ; ten of ; one of ; two of s."

"Among these pioneer zoologists the name of Verrill stands out prominently because of the amount and accuracy of his contributions to our knowledge of s. More than a thousand species, including , were discovered and described by him, and their relationships to previously known forms were diagnosed with almost unerring accuracy and with a facility that amounted almost to genius. He was much more than systematic zoologist, however; he was a real naturalist in that he was always interested in the of the animals which he studied as well as the morphological characters which distinguished the species new to science. His work on the natural history of he marine invertebrates of southern New England was the first extensive ecological study of its kind in America, and his Vineyard Sound report (published in 1871) was the standard reference book for all students of the seashore life of the region for more than thirty years."

"Biologists, or rather botanists and zoologists, studied flora and fauna in exhaustive detail, in niches, in situ, penetrating the mysteries of their local habitations, measuring them, counting them, tracking cycles, writing all this down in the equivalent of field guides, and developing the ability to predict many natural phenomena, including phenomena of change: if frost falls, the bud is harmed; if the soil is enriched, growth improves, and so on. The world of life forms was a text whose meaning the biologist interpreted. But these interpretations did not explain and were not meant to explain the biological processes according to which these species could exist in the first place, or descend, or develop, or differ. To explain these more basic issues required the theory of evolution, which, once it was available, became an indispensable instrument in the professional study of local, narrowly coordinated, in situ life forms and the niches they inhabit."

"Basic to a free society is the belief in a golden rule. Just as you feel you have the right to your opinion, you must feel that everyone else, in turn has a right to his."

"If any one thread runs through the UVM story, it is the continual belief that higher education should be pre-occupied with the progress of mankind."

"Education is, however, an extremely interesting and complex institution provided because society has discovered that, if it is to preserve itself and advance, it must spare the time and the people necessary to provide our young people with an understanding of their heritage. But education doesn't take place within institutions. It takes place only within individuals. It is something we cannot buy. It is something that records in the registrar's office do not measure."

"We can all join that most worthwhile of all wars—the fight for tolerance, the fight for wisdom, the fight for freedom. Above all else, continue to develop your tastes—material and spiritual—so that you may learn to choose the best values from life's many alternatives."

"Scientists in the Netherlands are endowing a robotic cat with a set of logical rules for emotions. They believe that by introducing emotional variables to the decision-making process, they should be able to create more-natural human and computer interactions."

"‘We don’t really believe that computers can have emotions, but we see that emotions have a certain function in human practical reasoning,’ says Mehdi Dastani, an artificial-intelligence researcher at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. By bestowing intelligent agents with similar emotions, researchers hope that robots can then emulate this human-like reasoning."

"Dastani’s emotional functions have been derived from a psychological model known as the OCC model, devised in 1988 by a trio of psychologists: Andrew Ortony and Allan Collins, of Northwestern University, and Gerald Clore, of the University of Virginia. ‘Different psychologists have come up with different sets of emotions,’ says Dastani. But his group decided to use this particular model because it specified emotions in terms of objects, actions, and events.”"

"Creativity does not originate from a vacuum."

"It made me appreciate what humans were capable of."

"Every limitation we place on the potential of machines is a limitation we indirectly place on ourselves."

"I see no reason why computer-created music cannot move us to tears, find roots in our cultures...as much as any music composed in more traditional ways. As heretical to some as these thoughts may be, I believe them profoundly."

"I felt strongly that the work was worth something,” “I don’t worry about what people think of me.”"

"“I remember thinking, ‘I’m not a white person and I’m not an Indian. What am I? Even at that young age, it somehow freed me from following cultural stereotypes. I was me, and it felt very good."

"Realizing that I didn’t belong has probably fostered my lifelong ability to not be concerned about those who attack me for being independent,” “I follow my own calling.”"

"The works have delighted, angered, provoked, and terrified those who have heard them. I do not believe that the composers and audiences of the future will have the same reactions. Ultimately, the computer is just a tool with which we extend our minds."

"As designers of robots (or avatars) we need to consider these statistics and consider how to integrate body language into natural language communication. Therefor Geppetto Labs has built a platform to automatically generate body language and coordinate it with what a robot (or avatar) is saying."

"Body language makes up about 40% of natural language: This can be automatically generated."

"Videos do an excellent job of conveying the importance of body language. A great video to watch is The History Channel’s Secrets of Body Language."

"So if we want people to engage emotionally with robots, or avatars (or any other kind of character that is rigged up to an NLP system), we need to consider using body language as part of that system. We humans are hardwired that way."

"I was working at a startup in New York City called Vision Applications, Inc. We were entirely funded by a Department of Defense contract to produce a miniature active vision system. My specialty at the time was computer vision and robotics."

"Our thoughts were far away from natural language processing. We were, however, deeply concerned with issues of cost and robot design."

"Like many of our colleagues at the time we espoused a "minimalist" design philosophy based on cheap sensors and simple stimulus-response algorithms, rather than complex and costly processing."

"These thoughts remained dormant through the first half of the 1990s, when I struggled to establish myself as a robotics and computer vision professor at NYU and Lehigh Universities. In a very real sense A.L.I.C.E. was born from the frustration of those experiences, and the realization that much of my own job as a professor was "robotic" responses to frequently asked questions."

"The concept of deception is layered like an onion. We can peel off one level and write programs like ELIZA that fool some of the people some of the time, and then peel off another layer and write a program like A.L.I.C.E. that (apparently) fools more of the people more of the time. The evidence suggests that we should take a serious look at the role of deception in AI."

"No other theory of natural language processing can better explain or reproduce the results within our territory. You don't need a complex theory of learning, neural nets, or cognitive models to explain how to chat within the limits of A.L.I.C.E.'s 25,000 categories. Our stimulus-response model is as good a theory as any other for these cases, and certainly the simplest."

"Imprecise language and buzzwords govern the computing ecosystem. I coined the term HTC in the mid-nineties in order to differentiate it from traditional High Performance Computing, known to many as supercomputers."

"What I’m doing today is anchored in my PhD work in the late 1970s. I always joke that I’ve been working on the same problem for over 40 years and it’s still not done! My thesis was on load balancing and distributed systems."

"I was always fascinated by the simple problem that you have a quest for work sitting and waiting in one place and a resource capable and willing to serve it is idling in another place. How do you bring them together? It turns out it’s an unsolvable problem so I can work for 40 more years."

"There are two Nobel Prize discoveries whose computation system was powered by HTCondor––the Higgs Boson in 2012 and then recently detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO collaboration. So I am always joking, I’m looking for the triple crown. But I can’t say that they’re more important or challenging than other works of science powered by HTCondor."

"But the personal angle is that we always saw what we are doing as expanding from the desktop to the world. And that’s how we went from the campus to nation-wide and beyond."

"We now share HTC capabilities across more than 125 institutions. And that brought with it many complications, not only in terms of volume of users, but also in diversity of science domains, types of institutions and politics. I always listed sociology as the top obstacle to high throughput computing and we have our fair share in the Open Science Grid."

"When The Mechanical Design Process was first introduced in 1992, I insisted that it be priced at less than $50. I felt this was a fair price for a university text on the topic. McGraw-Hill, the publisher, agreed and released it at $49. Over the years, McGraw-Hill steadily raised the price over my protests."

"I always knew that it was possible to buy back rights. When I decided to request the rights back, I did a lot of online reading to be sure I understood the ins and outs."

"The first thing to do is to self-educate. Second, consider hiring a lawyer. I did, but things went so smoothly that I didn’t need one. Third, ask for your rights back. I had expected [McGraw-Hill] to ask for many thousands for the rights based on my calculations of their profits for the next five years."

"One point I considered was how much I make from each sale. Even though I drastically cut the list price, I actually make more per book than I did when the book was sold through the publisher. I did a lot of research into which self-publishing house to use to find one where the royalty model fit my sales model."

"With my book, most sales are through university book stores with some coming through online sales. I found a self-publisher who would give me the most for these outlets (Ingram Spark). I do not expect any sales through brick and mortar book stores."

"The distinction between “intuitive” and “reflective” thinking has been, arguably, one of the most important distinctions in cognitive science. There are currently many dual-process theories (two-system views) out there."

"Toward developing a more fine-grained and more comprehensive framework, I will adopt the more generic but less loaded terms of implicit and explicit processes (Reber, 1989, Sun, 2002) and present a more nuanced view of these processes, centered on a computational “cognitive architecture”."

"It is assumed in this work that cognitive processes are carried out in two distinct ‘levels’ with qualitatively different mechanisms. Each level encodes a fairly complete set of knowledge for its processing, and the coverage of the two sets of knowledge encoded by the two levels overlaps substantially."

"It thus seems necessary that we come up with more nuanced and more detailed characterizations of the two systems (the two types of processes) in order to avoid painting the picture in too broad strokes."

"Those of us who have witnessed the marvellous development of the great motion picture industry, who have perhaps played in our childhood with the strangely named toys, which produced the crude effects of movement of a few printed figures on a short strip of paper, have lived through the most astonishing drama of all that the moving picture world has produced. Its own development to one of the principal industries of the world is a great romance. It is a romance told by thousands of films all over the civilized world; every film is a short chapter in the great story."