So They Say

So They Say "It's great. You can actually get him to agree with you." --Geneticist Bill Orr of Southern Methodist University in Dallas on why he likes the James Watson bobblehead doll. From The Scientist. "As a scientist, you cannot simply turn off the key and put the car in the garage." --Leeuwenhoek Medal-winner Karl Stetter on why he is starting up a biotech company in San Diego, instead of taking a pension since reaching Germany's mandatory retirement age. From Science. "It is

So They Say "Our research implies that genes account for some of the differences between male and female brains .... If we accept this concept, we must dismiss the myth that homosexuality is a 'choice' ..." --UCLA geneticist Eric Vilain, on his team's reported findings of sexuality genes. From Windy City Times. "The sound is rather like a large jet plane flying 100 feet (30m) above your house in the middle of the night." --University of Washington physicist John Cramer, trying to explain w

So They Say "I'll bet I'm the only high school student with one of these." --Craig Wallace, 18, of Salt Lake City, UT, on the nuclear fusion reactor he built from junkyard scraps based on plans from the Internet. From Deseret News. "All the normal excitatory signals that stimulate ejaculation, like touch, sight, sound and smell, can be replaced with the current from the probe. It's fascinating. Of course, this is a woman talking." --Professor of animal science Trish Berger, University of

So They Say "I remember thinking, 'Should I put in the word "emergency"?" --World Health Organization spokesperson Dick Thompson, recalling the first press release he wrote on a new illness in Asia, which he named SARS. From the National Association of Science Writers newsletter. "There are some samples I won't give." --J. Craig Venter, who gave the sample DNA for the human genome sequence, quashing rumors that he provided the human waste samples for a human gut genomics study. From The

So They Say "We believe that a defect in [the gene] may make one supersensitive to dopamine, somewhat like being born on cocaine." --Psychiatrist John Kelsoe, Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System, on his team's discovery of a genetic basis for manic depression. From the San Diego Union-Tribune "I need your word you are not going to publicize full frontal pictures of this tree." --Jared Milarch, Champion Tree Project, addressing volunteers who helped him clone Methuselah, the wo

So They Say "Passion, falling in love, and standing up for justice are all perfectly compatible with Asperger syndrome. What most people with AS find difficult is casual chatting--they can't do small talk." --Cambridge University researcher Simon Baron Cohen discussing his theory that Albert Einstein had AS, a form of autism. From New Scientist "It's almost as if someone drew a sharp line between old-world primates--including people--and other animals, saying, 'I'll let you clone cattle,

So They Say "The procedure is just too simple. There's no complicated cocktail of growth factors." --Hans Scholer, University of Pennsylvania, on how he got mouse embryonic stem cells to transform into ovaries by increasing their density in cell culture. From New Scientist "[Aging] is so often viewed as a process of decline--your hair falls out, your teeth fall out--but we're seeing aging as a process of development. All the biggest changes were for the better." --Stanford University's

So They Say "The iceberg is beginning to break up, but there's still a lot of ice [out] there. It's very important that people not get the idea, OK, everything's fixed now, because it's not." Susan Lindquist, director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, on equal opportunities for female scientists. From The New York Times "After years of drug development, it seems that the fortunes of the newest products in the erectile dysfunction market may be affected not only by advert

So They Say "I was a dentist for years, but I never even thought about baby teeth until I looked at my daughter's carefully." --Sontao Shi, National Institutes of Health, on discovering a new stem cell source--baby teeth. From UPI "People who don't even know how to spell RNA are able to use this successfully in diverse biological systems!" --Thomas Cech, head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, on new genomics technology. From BioIT World Magazine "We had all these follow-on 'omic

So They Say "It's like moving on from a first attempt demo music tape to a classic CD." --Jane Rogers, head of sequencing at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, on the completed, full sequence, human genome. From MSNBC. "If Heimlich is really doing this, he should be put in jail." --Mark Harrington, executive director of AIDS activist group Treatment Action Network, on the plans of 83-year-old Henry Heimlich (of Heimlich Maneuver fame) to infect African AIDS patients with malaria to kill

So They Say "If you think you've seen a biotech revolution, you ain't seen nothing yet," --Chief scientist James Murday, Office of Naval Research, when asked to compare the nanotech to the biotech revolution, at the National Nanotechnology Initiative Conference in Washington, DC "Now if we could just reduce the amount of ammonia in the feces, then our lab wouldn't smell so bad." --Veerle Fievez, Ghent University, Belgium, on her recent discovery that fish oil supplements reduce sheep m

So They Say "Remember, this was probably the most prolific man in history. He had a lot of children." --Oxford geneticist Chris Tyler-Smith discussing the logistical workings of his theory, which traces 8% of Central Asian men as direct patrilineal descendants of Genghis Khan. From The Scientist. "It was absolutely safe to transport it the way he did." --Attorney Floyd Holder explaining why his client, Texas Tech University biologist Thomas Butler, felt assured to carry glass-encased pl

So They Say "Working and living in someplace this remote, this bizarre, it's only fitting that your habitat should resemble the set of some 1970s sci-fi thriller." --Shayne Claussen, explaining why he'll stay in the South Pole's existing geodesic dome, rather than move into the NSF-funded, $130 million research station. From The New York Times. "I told him all you need is New York steak to make a good meal. He looked at that big one, shook his head, and said, 'I no need steak.'" --An

So They Say "Your statement that we don't need stem cell research because we're doing other stuff is crap." --James Watson, in response to a bioethicist's comment that stem cell research is just another line of research, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle. "Bioinformatics is nothing but good, sound, regular biology appropriately dressed so that it can fit into a computer." --From a new book, Bioinformatics for Dummies, by Jean-Michel Claverie and Cedric Notredame, published by Wil

So They Say "I have never been as worried for space shuttle safety as I am now. ... One of the roots of my concern is that nobody will know for sure when the safety margin has been eroded too far." --Richard D. Bloomberg, testifying before Congress in April 2002 as chairman of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel. From The New York Times.   "America's journey into space will go on." --US President George W. Bush, on Feb. 3, two days after the space shuttle Columbia exploded, kill

So They Say "The idea that Martha Stewart is part of a biotech story [ImClone] is somewhere between incomprehensible and galling." --Carl Feldbaum, president, Biotechnology Industry Organization. From The Scientist. "Everything that anyone publishes about the origin of the dog is controversial. That's because everyone, even the man on the street, feels he is an expert on the dog." --I. Lehr Brisbin, wildlife ecologist, University of Georgia, Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. From Scie

History Policies dominated by overreaction threaten to build walls around sick people and victimize them, and even the most robust democracy may not be strong enough to withstand such divisive forces. But knowledge brings with it the power to escape from the crippling stance of past generations, who were condemned to cower in ignorance be- fore the Black Plague or the invisible menace of yellow fever. The challenge is not merely to learn from history, but especially to cull the pertinent messa

People on the Private Side I set up the [National Cancer Institute’s biological response modification program beginning in 1980, and I left in February of 1984, and during that time I actually was trying to get more private involvement, to get a closer interface with the biotechnology industry, to get rotating scientists in from outside to try to open up and liberalize some of the viewpoints within the N.C.I. system.... They almost totally rejected it. It was a real closed shop in ter

"Building More Barriers" "Sen. Rockefeller on Japan" "Space Flight's New Law," "NSF Director on Physics Funding," by Erich Bloch "A Time To Publish, A Time To Recant," by Alex Weisskopf "Political Promises," by Bob Davis "Getting the Best Science," by Anthony S. Fauci "Science's Stamp Collectors," by Luis Alvarez No doubt about it; science can be tough to put across, and the areas furthest from everyday experience are the toughest, so one might suppose scientists would be anxio

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