Biologists From The United States

"Every day there are new estimates coming out for the incubation period (of COVID-19)."

"Whether or not a researcher of a certain notoriety deserves that the ‘support system’ [to] keep him going, there is a far more general problem: What props up biological research, at least in the vaunted US of A, involves a situation so deeply imbued with entitlement mentality that it has sunk into institutional corruption. A principal symptom of this state of affairs involves the following: People are hired after they have undergone long stints of training; and a potential hiree must present a large body of documented accomplishments. In my day you could get a faculty job with zero post-doc papers, as in the case of yours truly; but now the CV of a successful applicant looks like that of a newly minted full Professor from olden times. Notwithstanding these demands, and the associated high quality of a fledgling faculty-level type, the job starts with some “set-up” money for equipping the lab; but next to no means are provided to initiate that ‘research program’ and to sustain it during the years to come."

"Based on the virus genome and properties, there is no indication whatsoever that it (COVID-19) was an engineered virus."

"US institutions (possibly also those in other countries) behave as though they… are entitled to research funding, which will magically materialize from elsewhere: “Get a grant, serf! If you can’t do it quickly, or have trouble for some years — or if your funding doesn’t get renewed, despite continuing productivity — forget it!” But what if there are so many applicants (as there are nowadays) that even a meritorious proposal gets the supplicant nowhere or causes a research group to grind prematurely to a halt? What if the situation is worsened when the government at hand is anti-science and otherwise squanders its resources on international adventurism?"

"Having said all this, I acknowledge that “I got mine” from the government over the course of many years. Thus, as I say so long,” one component of my last-gasp disquiet stems from pompously worrying about biologists who are starting out or are in mid-career."

"In many ways, McPherson is a photo-negative of the self-proclaimed “climate skeptics” who reject the conclusions of climate science. He may be advocating the opposite conclusion, but he argues his case in the same way. The skeptics often quote snippets of science that, on full examination, don’t actually support their claims, and this is McPherson’s modus operandi. The skeptics dismiss science they don’t like by saying that climate researchers lie to keep the grant money coming; McPherson dismisses inconvenient science by claiming that scientists are downplaying risks because they’re too cowardly to speak the truth and flout our corporate overlords. Both malign the IPCC as “political” and therefore not objective. And both will cite nearly any claim that supports their views, regardless of source— putting evidence-free opinions on par with scientific research."

"McPherson’s case basically boils down to arguing that feedbacks like large methane releases will soon kick in, causing a rapid spike in global warming that will lead to global extinctions. One of his primary pieces of supporting evidence is that Earth System Sensitivity – which describes how sensitive the climate is to the increased greenhouse effect over millennia – is higher than the shorter-term climate sensitivity."

"The aerosol masking effect results from industrial activity, as does planetary warming, so this is an interesting Catch-22. Planetary warming results from es that trap heat, So once the radiation gets through the atmosphere it can warm the soil, and the buildings, and thus the effect, and the planet in general... [G]reenhouse gases trap that heat so that about 30% of it held in the atmosphere... Without the greenhouse effect we wouldn't have life on earth, but... we are well beyond the point at which we can stop... the negative consequences. [Overhead: Tiny particles known as aerosols reflect incoming sunlight back into space before the radiation can warm the planet.] According to professor , which most of us know as being one of the founders of understanding climate change, the aerosols fall out of the atmosphere in about five days."

"Accrding the the 6-month ensemble forecast created by the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and ice-free Arctic Ocean will not occur this year. ...[T]his was the same group of professors who incorrectly projected an ice-free Arctic Ocean to occur in 2016, plus or minus 3 years. So they are being very conservative."

"On September 17 of this year we bottom out at... about 4.7 million km2 of ice floating on the Arctic ocean... [T]he forecast has been below the actual data... So this is great news and... I recommend that you track it... because it will give you a good idea [of] when an ice-free Arctic Ocean will occur, and therefore when we are likely to lose habitat for most, if not all species on Earth."

"Henry Gee is a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and senior editor at Nature, and he concluded on November 30, 2021 in a paper in Scientific American... in the final line, "If we are going to write about human extinction, we'd better start writing now" and the title... is "Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct." That's very inconvenient!"

"Climate change and its impacts are here. Expect superstorms, extreme heat, high humidity, and increased spread of deadly diseases. Plants and non-human animals will die in ever-larger numbers. Civilisation will fail, leading to greatly exacerbated impacts."

"2018: based on "projections" of climate-change and species loss, "Specifically, I predict that there will be no humans on Earth by 2026"."

"I'm a teacher. I relay evidence. I cite science. I'm not relying on a belief system."

"I've been accused of many things, extremist included. I'm merely connecting a few dots based on the work of other scientists. In a culture characterised by willful ignorance and the inability to think critically, these accusations are to be expected."

"2007: permanent blackouts in cities starting in 2012 due to ;"

"The cooling resulting from contemporary aerosol masking in total right now is 55% globally, including a lot of that [Overhead: 133%] being on land. This is from... an open access peer reviewed journal... Nature Communications..."

"Other scientists are specialists. They focus on a narrow topic. They do not consider the entire Earth system in their work..."

"2012: "likely" extinction of humanity by 2030 due to climate-change, and mass die-off by 2020 "for those living in the interior of a large continent""

"The seeds of a few kinds of weeds can be carried long distances by natural means; for instance, dandelion seeds are wind-transported, cockleburs and stickseeds are carried by the hair of animals. However, the seeds of most weeds are spread by human agencies, most commonly in mixtures with agricultural seed."

"Legumes are vital because they provide fixed nitrogen for agricultural soils (the recent substitution of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers certainly being a temporary expedient), and because they furnish most of the protein for human food in high-population parts of the world. Man's dependence on grasses and legumes has been coeval."

"RULE 3 The division of labor (complexity) varies with size."

"RULE 4 The rate of various living processes varies with size, such as metabolism, generation time, longevity, and the speed of locomotion."

"RULE 5 The abundance of organisms in nature varies with their size."

"RULE 2 Surfaces that permit diffusion of oxygen, of food, of heat in and out of the body, vary with size."

"Merino sheep always flock while Highland sheep spread. The reason is that in Spain the summer feeding and winter feeding of the sheep were widely separated, and the shepherd had to march them many miles along the road and through the villages. If they did not flock, they would soon be lost in their seasonal journey. On the other hand, the Scottish shepherd never moves his Highland sheep large distances and wishes them to spread out as much as possible over the hills so that no one area is overgrazed, and both of these characteristics have been achieved by selective breeding."

"First, there was a selection for an increase in size by becoming multicellular, and once achieved there was a selection for better integration, a better coordination of the adhering cells to compete effectively for energy and for a way to reproduce successfully. Then, which each successive step of size increase, propelled always by the fact the uppermost size niche is never filled, there has been a further selection pressure for integration and coordination, often by new and innovative devices to accommodate the newly created larger organism."

"RULE 1 Strength varies with size."

"Age-related sensory changes can be traced to degeneration in some of the cells and cell products that compose the sense organ itself."

"Natural selection favors animals that are most likely to become reproductively successful by developing better survival strategies and greater reserve capacity in vital systems to better escape predation, disease, accidents, and environmental extremes. Natural selection diminishes after reproductive success because the species will not benefit from members favored for greater longevity. The level of physiological reserve remaining after reproductive maturity determines longevity and evolves incidental to the selection process that acts on earlier developmental events. Physiological reserve does not renew at the same rate that it incurs losses because molecular disorder increases at a rate greater than the capacity for repair. These are age changes, and they increase vulnerability to predation, accidents, or disease."

"Since the first cell culture was set at the beginning of the twentieth century it was believed that all cultured cells, if provided with the proper conditions, would replicate indefinitely. Sixty years later we overthrew this dogma by finding that normal cells have a finite capacity to replicate and that only abnormal or cancer cell populations can replicate indefinitely. We interpreted these findings to bear on our understanding of the aging process. If, as had been previously thought, normal cells can replicate indefinitely, then age changes could not have an intracellular origin. Our findings demonstrated that, on the contrary, age changes do have an intracellular origin. The hundreds of changes that were subsequently found to precede the loss of replicative capacity have been interpreted to be age changes and the finitude of replication to be an expression of longevity determination. Subsequent findings by others have determined the molecular mechanism that governs the finitude of normal cell replicative capacity and how immortal cancer cells escape this inevitability."

"Geron's board was a Who's Who of telomere research, with a little biological stardust thrown in. It included Carol Greider (who ran a lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory now), Woody Wright and Jerry Shay, Michael West's former mentors at the University of Texas; James Watson, the famed codiscoverer of the double helix; and, for historical, scientific, and even sentimental reasons, Leonard Hayflick."

"When Barbara McClintock was awarded a Nobel Prize for her work on gene transposition in corn plants, the most striking thing about her was that she made her discoveries by listening to what the corn spoke to her, by respecting the life of the corn and "letting it McClintock says she learned "the stories" of the plants. She "heard them. She watched the daily green journeys of growth from carth toward sky and sun. She knew her plants in the way a healer or mystic would have known them, from the inside, the inner voices of corn and woman speaking to one another. As an Indian woman, I come from a long history of people who have listened to the language of this continent, people who have known that corn grows with the songs and prayers of the people, that it has a story to tell, that the world is alive...This intuitive and common language is what I seek for my writing, work in touch with the mystery and force of life, work that speaks a few of the many voices around us, and it is important to me that McClintock listened to the voices of corn. It is important to the continuance of life that she told the truth of her method and that it reminded us all of where our strength, our knowing, and our sustenance come from. It is also poetry, this science, and I note how often scientific theories lead to the world of poetry and vision, theories telling us how atoms that were stars have been transformed into our living, breathing bodies. And in these theories, or maybe they should be called stories, we begin to understand how we are each many people, including the stars we once were, and how we are in essence the earth and the universe, how what we do travels clear around the earth and returns. In a single moment of our living, there is our ancestral and personal history, our future, even our deaths planted in us and already growing toward their fulfillment. The corn plants are there, and like all the rest we are forever merging our borders with theirs in the world collective."

"In the year of her election to the National Academy, she began the series of experiments that led her to transposition—work that many now see as the most important of her career. At the time, only she thought so. To most, her conclusions seemed too radical."

"In 1950, Barbara McClintock published a Classic PNAS article, “The origin and behavior of mutable loci in maize,” which summarized the evidence leading to her discovery of transposition. The article described a number of genome alterations revealed through her studies of the Dissociation locus, the first mobile genetic element she identified. McClintock described the suite of nuclear events, including transposon activation and various chromosome aberrations and rearrangements, that unfolded in the wake of genetic crosses that brought together two broken chromosomes 9. McClintock left future generations with the challenge of understanding how genomes respond to genetic and environmental stresses by mounting adaptive responses that frequently include genome restructuring."

"If chromosomes are broken by various means, the broken ends appear to be adhesive and tend to fuse with one another 2-by-2. This has been abundantly illustrated in the studies of chromosomal aberrations induced by X-ray treatment. It also occurs after mechanical rupture of ring-shaped chromosomes during somatic mitoses in maize and is assumed to occur during the normal process of crossing-over."

"When, through radiation or other causes, chromosomes are broken within a single nucleus, 2-by-2 fusions may occur between the broken ends. These fusions may lead to rearrangements of parts of the chromatin complement, giving rise to various chromosomal aberrations which are detected as reciprocal translocations, inversions, deficiencies, etc. Since, in the well-investigated cases, the breakages occurred within a single nucleus, the conditions that lead to fusions of broken ends could not easily be ascertained."

"An experiment conducted in the mid-nineteen forties prepared me to expect unusual responses of a genome to challenges for which the genome is unprepared to meet in an orderly, programmed manner. In most known instances of this kind, the types of response were not predictable in advance of initial observations of them. It was necessary to subject the genome repeatedly to the same challenge in order to observe and appreciate the nature of the changes it induces. Familiar examples of this are the production of mutation by X-rays and by some mutagenic agents. In contrast to such “shocks” for which the genome is unprepared, are those a genome must face repeatedly, and for which it is prepared to respond in a programmed manner. Examples are the “heat shock” responses in eukaryotic organisms, and the “SOS” responses in bacteria. Each of these initiates a highly programmed sequence of events within the cell that serves to cushion the effects of the shock. Some sensing mechanism must be present in these instances to alert the cell to imminent danger, and to set in motion the orderly sequence of events that will mitigate this danger. The responses of genomes to unanticipated challenges are not so precisely programmed. Nevertheless, these are sensed, and the genome responds in a descernible but initially unforeseen manner."

"Here we are up in Caribou, which is my home as well as yours, but when you think about your home, you usually think about your house, your neighborhood, and your family, and when you look at this fragile blue ball from outer space, that’s home too. It’s everybody’s home."

"Mars has always captured the human imagination for decades and decades, it’s always been the planet that everyone’s looking toward. Knowing it’s out there, it’s what drives everything that we do."

"There’s no one path to becoming an astronaut. I think that’s one of the great things about the job these days. You know, originally, all of the astronauts were white male military test pilots. And now the program is much more diverse."

"It might have had something to do with the fact that the stars shone so brightly in rural Maine."

"Complex as it is, much of the vast network of cellular functions has been successfully dissected, on a microscopic scale, by the use of mutants in which one element is altered at a time. A similar approach may be fruitful in tackling the complex structures and events underlying behavior, using behavioral mutations to indicate modifications of the nervous system. Drosophila offers the same advantages to such a study as it did to classical genetics, namely, large numbers and short generation time, to which now may be added an enormous store of accumulated knowledge concerning the organism. Containing about 105 neurons, the fly's nervous system is roughly halfway, on a logarithmic scale, between a single neuron and the human brain, and the fly is possessed of a rich repertoire of behavior."

"The phenomenon of genetic recombination provides a powerful tool for separating mutations and discerning their positions along a chromosome. When it comes to very closely neighboring mutations, a difficulty arises, since the closer two mutations lie to one another, the smaller the probability that recombination between them will occur. Therefore, failure to observe recombinant types among a finite number of progeny ordinarily does not justify the conclusion that the two mutations are inseparable but can only place an upper limit on the linkage distance between them. A high degree of resolution requires the examination of very may progeny. This can best be achieved if there is available a selective feature for the detection of small proportions of recombination."

"The problems that Benzer and his students are solving are problems that scientists and philosophers from the beginning of recorded history have been unable to solve and also unable to ignore."

"Key aspects of the bacteriophage work illustrate central features of Seymour's ability to design scientific investigations; these features played out again and again in his scientific career, to great success. One of these is the “simple assay.” Seymour was an enthusiast of developing and using simple assays to approach any biological question of interest. Why use a complicated, time-consuming assay if a simple one would address the question equally well? Using a simpler assay would give more time and opportunity to delve in greater depth into the specific scientific question, as well as allow more time and opportunity to address additional questions of great interest."

"Symbioses are central in the evolution of complexity; have evolved many times and are critical to the lifestyles of many animals and plants and also to whole ecosystems, in which symbiotic organisms are key players. The primary reason that symbiosis research is suddenly active, after decades at the margins of mainstream biology, is that DNA technology and genomics give us enormous new ability to discover symbiont diversity, and more significantly, to reveal how microbial metabolic capabilities contribute to the functioning of hosts and biological communities."

"Buchnera only have 600 genes, compared to about 4,000 or 5,000 for E. coli ... This is a recurring pattern in the genomes of both bacterial symbionts and pathogens, but why do they get so small? ... while part of the reduction is due to adaptation, a lot of it just reflects genetic drift ... It's just a consequence of long-term evolution in a restricted environment with small population sizes."

"Life cycles that incorporate discrete, morphologically distnct phases predominate among animals."

"Among the many early revelations from molecular phylogenetic studies of bacteria (Woese, 1987) was the recognition that the mycoplasmas represented an evolutionarily derived condition rather than a primitive one, as once believed. Now that phylogenetic relationships and genome sizes are determined for a broader array of organisms, it is clear that the mycoplasmas are just one example of genome shrinkage that has occurred in a variety of obligately host-associated bacteria. Other prominent examples are Rickettsia and related pathogens within the α-proteobacteria; insect symbionts within the γ-proteobacteria, as exemplified by Buchnera aphidicola in aphids; the chlamydiae; and the parasitic spirochetes, such as Borrelia burgdorferi (the agent of Lyme disease)."