Beston:

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the sense we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not bethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the Earth.

H Beston, (1949) "The outermost house: a year of life on the great beach of Cape Cod".

In a similar way, the often ingenious explanation of individual phenomena of neocortex do not add up to a coherent theory of the neocortex. On the contrary, the accumulation of such ad hoc hypotheses actually may obstruct the emergence of a coherent theory. In such a situation the temptation is to carry on collecting interesting data and contribute further to what Rushton (1965) called "the ever thickening forest of fact.".

RJ Douglas and KAC Martin, in TINS.

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

JD Watson, (1980) "The double helix : a personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA".

Young people contine to smoke despite warnings by public health authorites of the dangers[...]. My suggestion is this: smoking is associated with urinary incontinence in women. Cigarette packets should therefore carry the message: "Cigarettes cause urinary incontinence." Young people may be half in love with easeful death, but easeful incontinence is a different matter. Once smoking becomes associated with incontinence pads, it will become less fashionable.

William James, Nature Vol 381 No 6581 (1996) p. 363.

I, for one, would celebrate Barbara McClintock not as a prophet but just as a supremely perceptive and individual scientist. If she has a message, it maybe that we should always believe our observations, however bizarre they may seem. They may be trying to tell us something.

J.R.S. Fincham, from an article about Barbara McClintock.

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.

Samuel Butler, _Life and Habit_ (1877)

Surgeons have figured out why so many people get headaches after surgery: prohibiting the intake of liquids for a day before operations deprives the patients of their cola or coffee, and the headache is the result of caffeine withdrawal. "We're not talking just about people who go through two or three pots of coffee a day," says Dr. Joseph Weber of the Mayo Clinic, since about 80 percent of Americans consume at least some caffeine daily. "Even one small caffeinated beverage a day will do it." The cure: give a bit of intravenous caffeine before or just after surgery. (AP)

AP Wire Service

There appear to be no obvious reasons why L(eft)-amino acids are favored in proteins from biological systems. Most modern biochemists believe that the properties of enantiomeric biological macromolecules would be equivalent except for interactions with chiral substances, and that the handedness evident in the biosphere is an incidental consequence of a unique evolutionary event that could equally well have resulted in the opposite enantiomers. Pasteur thought that the observed handedness of the biosphere was not the result of chance, but was a consequence of a chiral force in nature. The modern version of this idea invokes the inherent handedness of our universe, as revealed in the nonconservation of parity in particle physics, as a cause of the particular enantiomers found in biological systems.

These people had completely synthesized an enzyme using D-amino acids, and found that it did in fact still have activity. Their remark relates back to the idea someone had about how the universe would be created: Levorotatory or Dextrorotatory....