Scientists From The United States

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"“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.”"

"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."

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

"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]."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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, 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."

"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."

"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."

"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..."

"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."

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

"... 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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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 ?"

"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."