"No virus is known to do good: it has been well said that a virus is "a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein."
Sir Peter Brian Medawar was a British biologist and writer, whose works on graft rejection and the discovery of acquired immune tolerance have been fundamental to the medical practice of tissue and organ transplants. For his scientific works, he is regarded as the "father of transplantation". He is remembered for his wit both in person and in popular writings. Richard Dawkins referred to him as "t
"We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air of implausibility; but there is one high poetic fancy in the New Atlantis that stays in the mind after all its fancies and inventions have been forgotten. In the New Atlantis, an island kingdom lying in very distant seas, the only commodity of external trade is — light: Bacons own special light, the light of understanding."
"When asked to make the formal declaration that I did not intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, I was fool enough to reply that I had no such purpose, but that were I to do it by mistake I should be inexpressibly contrite."
"French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit."
"In no sense other than an utterly trivial one is reproduction the inverse of chemical disintegration. It is a misunderstanding of genetics to suppose that reproduction is only intended to make facsimiles, for parasexual processes of genetical exchange are to be found in the simplest living things."
"The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it."
"If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs."