biologists-from-italy

"The Genome Project has been a great adventure. It began as the dream of a few visionaries, was embraced by the entire scientific community, and achieved its goals with the cooperation of public and private institutions. This is the true story of a great scientific achievement in our time. The secret of its success includes many factors. The main one was the absolute dedication of many scientists, who believed they could achieve their goal despite the scarcity of technical means available. These means were quickly developed, such as new and fully automated technologies to determine the organisation of DNA, trace genes, read the messages they contain and their meanings. New approaches were used to determine gene activity, exploring the entire genome in a single step. The contribution of information technology has been extraordinary in this progress."

"My greatest contribution to biology was bringing Dulbecco."

"I hope that I too have been able to accept death as ‘Sister Death’, from whom no living person can escape. If I have been worthy in life, if I have borne my cross as I was asked to do, I am now with the Creator. I am now with my God, with the God of my fathers, in his indestructible House. He, our God, the one true God, is the first cause and end of all things. In the face of death nothing makes sense but him. Therefore, although there is no need to say it, for He knows everything, as I have thanked you I also want to thank Him. I owe my whole life to God, every good thing. Faith has accompanied me and I would not be what I am without my Faith. He changed my life, He picked it up, He made something extraordinary out of it, and He did it in the simplicity of my everyday life. Never grow weary, my brothers and sisters, of serving God and behaving according to His commandments, for nothing makes sense without Him and because our every action will be judged and will decide who will live on forever and who will have to die."

"Personal glory, greatness, fame, are but a passing thing. The love that is created in life, on the other hand, is eternal, for God alone is eternal, and love comes to us from God. If there is one thing I have never regretted, it is that I have loved so many people in my life, and so much."

"I do not deny that although my intention was to be a great in history for doing good, part of this desire was also due to selfishness. The selfishness of those who simply want to feel more than others. I fought this unhealthy desire with all my might, knowing full well that God does not like those who do things for themselves, but despite this I did not always succeed. I realise now, as I write this letter, imagining what my last moment on earth will be like, that it is the stupidest desire one can have."

"No form (including man) is [...] a form derived or improved with respect to some "primitive" progenitor. Man does not derive from primates (in the same way that birds do not derive from reptiles) except in the deceptive sense in which any form can be considered derived "from" the larger group to which it belongs. […] We have given names to the pre-human forms. We called them man-apes, subhumans, or brutes. But did they ever exist, or rather don't they belong to a mythology that has now disappeared?"

"Exhilarated by his 'discovery', Darwin jotted down these sentences: 'Origin of man now proven. Metaphysics must flourish. Anyone who understood the baboon would do more for metaphysics than Locke did." Darwinian metaphysics placed all wickedness, all cruelty, all evil at its origins, in the bestial. Carrying this thought to extreme consequences which are certainly not Christian, Darwin placed the Devil at the origin, he made man a redeemed demon. "The origin of our kind," he wrote, "is the cause of our evil passions! The Devil in the form of a Baboon is our grandfather." This doctrine was cultivated and developed by Darwin's cousin, the great statistician Francis Galton. [...] «The sense of original sin» he wrote in 1865 «would not demonstrate, according to my theory, that man has fallen from a superior condition, but rather that he is rapidly recovering from an inferior one»."

"Have you ever stopped to see seagulls suspended in the wind? If all beings on earth disappeared and only the seagulls remained, and maybe the little fish for their food, perhaps you think that from the seagulls, with the passing of millions of years, the animals that inhabit the earth and also man and perhaps even the frogs, butterflies and minnows? And even if the seagulls disappeared, can you imagine that the little fish of the sea, through gradual transformations, would give rise, at the end of time, to new seagulls or in any case to some new kind of sea bird capable of hovering in the air?"

"It should be clear by now that there are people who can, in fact, be reasonably considered experts; that it is rational to rely, within limits, on expert opinion; and that it is possible, by exercising relatively simple criteria, to gain insight into whether a particular expert is reliable or not. It is also true that experts, of course, do make mistakes, and that even the agreement of a large majority of experts in a field does not guarantee that they got it right. That’s the nature of scientific truth, as we have seen throughout this book: it is tentative, because it is the result of a human endeavor that is limited both by the type and amount of available evidence and by humans’ finite mental powers and emotional reactions. But the examples above show how you can, with a little bit of practice, tell science from bunk!"

"Once data are ruled out as arbiters among theories, those theories become pointless, just another clever intellectual game."

"I consider imperfection a Darwinian spring of natural selection. For example, present day insects are identical to those of six million years ago: they were already perfect, and there was no reason for them to change. Man was instead imperfect, and this was the proxy for his own development and evolution."

"The young need to know how lucky they are to have been born in this splendid country, Italy."

"It is imperfection — not perfection — that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain, and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological and intellectual development."

"I have lost a bit of my sight, much of my hearing. At conferences, I can't see the presentations and can't hear well. But I think more now than when I when I was twenty. The body can do whatever it likes. I am not the body: I am the mind."

"The allegations against Fidia cannot be true. The process for awarding Nobel prizes is so complex that it cannot be corrupted."

"She had this feeling for what was happening biologically. She was an intuitive observer, and she saw that something was making these nerve connections grow and was determined to find out what it was."

"She seemed able to face with equal equanimity the rigours of fascist cruelty and suppression that she was dealt as a Jew; the problems of practising underground medicine in wartime; the difficulties posed by prejudice and discrimination against women; and the near isolation and challenges of those working at the cutting edge of science."

"After centuries of dormancy, young women can now look toward a future moulded by their own hands."

"Man is ruined by servility, conformism, obsequiousness, rather than aggressiveness, which is much more common in the environment than within ourselves."

"In life one should never give in, surrender oneself to mediocrity, but rather move out of that grey area where everything is habit and passive resignation. One has to grow the courage to rebel."

"The women who changed the world never needed to show anything other than their own intelligence."

"I never had any hesitation or regrets in this sense. My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work and interests. I have never felt lonely."

"Rare are those people who use the mind, few use the heart and really unique are those who use both."

"Everything came easy to me in life. I could always shake off difficulties, like water on a duck's wings."

"I'm an atheist: I don't know what it means to believe in God."

"Those who are lucky enough to have faith are granted with a great support in all stages of life. If instead of an anthropomorphous God, who rewards the good, one replaces the imperative chiselled in our genetic program that good deeds have a price in themselves, and that evil has its own punishment, both the non-believer and the believer will find the same answer."

"Better to add life to your days than days to your life."