Gottfried Schatz

"I find it hard to swallow that I have only ten times more genes than those lowly bacteria in my gut. I had always liked the fact that they have ten thousand times less DNA than I did — that felt about right — but a factor of ten was carrying democracy a bit too far."

"I am tired of hearing that the DNA in my cells nucleus is the complete blueprint of what is, or could be, me. There is more to me than that. The sequence of my nuclear DNA is not "My Genome.""

"Hold somebody's hand and feel its warmth. Gram per gram, it converts 10 000 times more energy per second that the sun. You find this hard to believe? Here are the numbers: an average human weighs 70 kilograms and consumes about 12 600 kilojoules / day; that makes about 2 millijoules / gram.second, or 2 milliwatts / gram. For the sun it's a miserable 0.2 microjoules / gram.second. Some bacteria, such as the soil bacterium "Azotobacter" convert as much as 10 joules / gram.second, outperforming the sun by a factor 50 million. I am warm because inside each of my body cells there are dozens, hundreds or even thousands of mitochondria that burn the food I eat."

"Heute bilden die Naturwissenschafter den intellektuellen Stosstrupp unserer Kultur, doch noch vor 200 Jahren waren sie Briefmarkensammler im Schatten genialer Denker wie Kant, Kierkegaard und Schopenhauer. Dann entpuppte sich die Briefmarkensammlung jedoch als Quelle grosser Wahrheiten über uns und die Welt."

"Die Naturwissenschaften konnten unserem Leben keinen Sinn geben, weil sie keine zielgerichtete Evolution des Universums oder des Lebens fanden – und wohl auch nie finden werden."

""Das Wunderbare an uns Menschen ist, dass wir zwei Vererbungssysteme besitzen"