Women Scientists From The United States

"There were indeed human hazards in this country—but not to go there at all because of the possibility of encountering them? Unthinkable! It has become ever more clear to me that if I had spent my life avoiding any and all potential risks, I would have missed doing most of the things that have comprised of the best years of my life."

"Emotion and personal desire really do reign in all passionate endeavors, not objectivity and reason. And sometimes we’re just plain lucky enough to get away with it."

"I hadn’t done much traveling in Arab countries, and it’s certainly not my favorite culture (a common enough viewpoint among emancipated western women), but both geographically and ornithologically I found it fascinating."

"Chances are, if I can feel a lump, there has already been some spread to internal organs, in which case my time of health is probably limited to a few months. Now may well be my final opportunity to go birding on a foreign trip, and I can’t just throw that away. If it’s my last trip, so be it—but I’m going to make it a good one and go down binoculars in hand!"

"Black-necked Cranes on the Tibetan plateau were my last of this family and left me with some unexpectedly ambivalent feelings—triumph at having finally seen them all, yet sadness that there were now no more left to look for."

"I desperately wanted to continue running my own life, because I was healthy and, physically, felt just fine. I accepted the fact that my life wasn’t going to last long, but I very quickly came to the conclusion that I preferred a short span of quality living under my control, followed by a quick death, to a longer life protracted by various all-consuming medical treatments and their effects, probably followed by a lingering death."

"The problem is that the attention span of humans as individuals is a year or two. If you have a disaster, you basically have a year or two to try to change human behavior, and then interest fades"

"Furthermore, in the current intellectual climate, and with the large numbers of scientists in the world today, there are few measures of creativity. We measure productivity, not not simple numerical counting, or even measures of “impact.” Perhaps as a community, we need a new form of peer evaluations of individuals within that context."

"If I could take some liberty and propose a generality based on my own experience, I would say that scientists live internally with fundamentals, harmonics, overtones, and dissonances, but strive to seek and sort out the fundamental from the harmonics and overtones. Artists, on the other hand, have the liberty of portraying all of these simultaneously."

"If we want to improve our odds of surviving disaster, we need to do two things. First, we need to be prepared for the rarest, biggest events. Currently we invest in infrastructure to protect us from the smaller events — be they tornados, eruptions, earthquakes or even small tsunamis that can be shut out by common storm wave barriers on exposed coastlines. But, we rarely have made the costly investments necessary to protect us from the rare, but truly devastating, big events."

"Our collective work in the geosciences has made, and must continue to make, a difference in how humans interact with our planet."

"I think the only thing that has a broader range of scales than geology is astronomy. Geologists really look at things from the atomic scale to the solar system scale, and we potentially think about planets beyond the solar system."

"One of the things I discovered in writing my book, The Dynamics of Disaster, was the thrill of learning about completely new things that my research would never ever have taken me into."

"I think the basic motivation for my research and publishing papers in the conventional media is curiosity."

"And my mother shrieked ... "You can't leave that child here alone!" And, you know, fair enough. And this unmistakable voice, above and behind me, said, "Emily and I will be fine." And I turned around and said, "Thank you." And my mother looked at me and said, "You can't leave Emily with a total stranger!" And I said, "Mom, if you can't trust Joe DiMaggio, who can you trust?""

"When women our age started in the field, there were very few of us, and we were absolutely on the margins. People pretty much ignored us. I have come to realize that there was a great freedom in being ignored, that you could go after huge questions, because nobody noticed."

"When those of us who are now middle-aged went to high school and to college, what we learned about cancer was completely descriptive. We learned how cancer cells look compared to the way normal cells look and it was beautiful, it was elegant. We learned how cancerous organs look compared to the way normal organs look. We learned about how patients decline with cancer. But it was very frustrating at least for me, because we didn’t have any understanding or sense of why these processes were occurring. Exactly what was happening, why it was it happening, when was it happening, how was it happening, all the questions you ask of mystery. We now don’t have them all answered — if it were an easy problem it would have long since been solved. But we do have a very good sense of the kinds of changes that a cell undergoes between the time it is a normal cell and the time that it is growing completely out of control, causes a tumor that can invade, metastasize and kill its host."

"While the geological explorations of the South Mountain have been careful and minute and conducted by able geologists, the petrography of its rocks has never been thoroughly investigated. The microscope has not been used to assist in determining the nature and origin of the rocks, and to correct impressions colored by preconceived ideas or by an experience more or less limited to sedimentary structures. Under microscopic scrutiny and the comparative study of recent lavas, an increasing number of the so-called sedimentary rocks are proving to be igneous in origin."

"Probably no one will ever know all the difficulties that she encountered, but little by little she achieved her purpose of making her department one of the best in the country."

"That she did master the subject and decide to make it her specialty is an indication of her courage and of that determination which found nothing too difficult."

"I have always claimed that there was no merit in being the only one of a kind.... I have considerable pride in the fact that some of the best work done in geology today by women, ranking with that done by men, has been done by my students.... these are all notable young women who will be a credit to the science of geology."

"It is an interesting manifestation of the attitude of certain public critics toward change, that when the collegiate training of women was first on trial there were clamorous complaints that the health of young women was being wrecked; now the same class of public critics are loudly complaining that college women are "Amazons.""

"The fascination of any search after truth lies not in the attainment, which at best is found to be very relative, but in the pursuit, where all the powers of the mind and character are brought into play and are absorbed by the task. One feels oneself in contact with something that is infinite and one finds joy that is beyond expression in sounding the abyss of science and the secrets of the infinite mind."

"Oh! Be A Fine Girl — Kiss Me!"

"In our troubled days it is good to have something outside our planet, something fine and distant for comfort."

"Children of America are hooked on their product. There is cynical knowledge on behalf of these Big Tech companies that this is true."

"Facebook is not interested in making significant changes to improve kids' safety on their platforms, at least not when that would result in losing eyeballs on posts or decreasing their ad revenues."

"Big Tech now faces the Big Tobacco jaw-dropping moment of truth."

"The damage to self-interest and self-worth inflicted by Facebook today will haunt a generation."

"The past is constantly affecting the present, and there are few places that illustrate this fact better than Rome."

"The big secret is that academia doesn’t measure all the qualities of what makes a great contributor to society, such as in engineering. We only judge a small subset."

"We all have a role to play in ensuring equality and justice for all our brothers and sisters"

"You can increase diversity in the workplace by looking beyond the select few schools deemed 'elite'"

"Just being prepared is the best you can expect from yourself."

"The best leaders recognize the talents of each individual and bring those talents out of those people so they can apply them to problems."

"Sometimes you are lucky enough in life to meet someone who changes you for the better"

"Quorum sensing-controlled behaviors are those that only occur when bacteria are at high cell population densities. These behaviors are ones that are unproductive when undertaken by an individual bacterium but become effective by the simultaneous action of a group of cells. For example, quorum sensing regulates bioluminescence, virulence factor expression, biofilm formation, sporulation, and mating. Quorum sensing is achieved through the production, release, and subsequent detection of and response to threshold concentrations of signal molecules called autoinducers. The accumulation of a stimulatory concentration of an extracellular autoinducer can only occur when a sufficient number of cells, a “quorum,” is present."

"... if we could either keep harmful bacteria from communicating, or help beneficial bacteria to communicate, those could be new kinds of therapeutics that could be developed in the future."

"Quorum sensing, or the control of gene expression in response to cell density, is used by both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria to regulate a variety of physiological functions. In all cases, quorum sensing involves the production and detection of extracellular signalling molecules called autoinducers. While universal signalling themes exist, variations in the design of the extracellular signals, the signal detection apparatuses, and the biochemical mechanisms of signal relay have allowed quorum sensing systems to be exquisitely adapted for their varied uses."

"There is no difference between a mental-health issue and a neurological issue."

"Even quite mild acute uncontrollable stress can cause a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities, and more prolonged stress exposure causes architectural changes in prefrontal dendrites."

"There's a lot of research out there that says yes there is harm, there is risk. There are a hundred deaths each year from male circumcision. It's not a separate show. You're saying we're abusing girls. You are accepting that it is okay to perform a much more intensive or invasive procedure on boys. I think if we accept it, in American society, that we do remove the foreskin on boys, we do practice genital cutting here in the US on boys, that it should not be impossible to understand that there are cultures, there are societies, that practice what certain people are now calling gender-inclusive surgery. So it's okay to cut boys in your society? In our culture we don't discriminate. We have gender-egalitarian surgeries."

"The legislation of the government has been directed rather to the protection of the rights of money and property than to the best good of the citizen."

"The people who were once owners of this soil ask you for their liberty, and law is liberty."

"For wrongs like these we have no redress whatever. We have no protection from the law."

"Another time a man of our tribe went to a settlement about ten miles distant from our reserve to sell potatoes. While he stood sorting them out two young men came along.-they were white men, and one of them had just arrived from the East; he said to his companion, "I should like to shoot that Indian, just to say that I had shot one." His companion badgered him to do it. He raised his revolver and shot him."

"So many seem to think that Indians fight because they delight in being savage and are bloodthirsty."

"We are human beings; God made us as well as you"

"For the past hundred years the Indians have had none to tell the story of their wrongs. If a white man did an injury to an Indian he had to suffer in silence, or being exasperated into revenge, the act of revenge has been spread abroad through the newspapers of the land as a causeless act, perpetrated on the whites just because the Indian delighted in being savage. It is because I know that a majority of the whites have not known of the cruelty practiced by the "Indian ring" on a handful of oppressed, helpless and conquered people, that I have the courage and confidence to appeal to the people of the United States."

"It seems to us sometimes that the government treats us with less consideration than it does even the dogs."