Carl Zimmer Quotes

#1. To learn more about parasites, check out Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer. There are many, many books on the subject, but his is one of the most accessible jumping-on points you're likely to find. Welcome to the war.

Mira Grant

#2. Evolution has led to some populations of people being able to digest milk without much trouble when they're adults as well.

Carl Zimmer

#3. Borna virus is not a retrovirus. It doesn't actually insert its own genes into our cells. What it does is just hangs out near our DNA and uses some of the molecular machinery to copy itself.

Carl Zimmer

#4. I am a single, useless snail-loathing datum.

Carl Zimmer

#5. One of the big challenges now is to figure out just how many viruses there really are in the human genome. So far the estimate is 8.3% of our genome is virus, but it actually could be a lot higher.

Carl Zimmer

#6. We may be sucking in all sorts of viruses and we really don't know the full range of them. Maybe we've got flu virus inside of us. That's a possibility. Maybe we're part flu.

Carl Zimmer

#7. I am so blessed that all I've done in my professional life, since I was 17-18, is play music and somehow make a dollar here and there.

Ian McLagan

#8. You are my conscience. You have ever been, James Carstairs.

Cassandra Clare

#9. Over millions of years the viruses in our genome mutate more and more so the look less and less and less recognizable as viruses and so if there was a virus that infected our pre mammal ancestors like 250 million years ago, which it probably did, we can't see it because it just looks totally random.

Carl Zimmer

#10. I never knew any man who had once tasted the sweetness of experimental knowledge, that ever afterward fasted after ye Vapour garlick and onions of phantasmatical seeming philosophy. {William Petty]

Carl Zimmer

#11. The hand is where the mind meets the world.

Carl Zimmer

#12. The reason that viruses are so hard to fight, the reason for example we need a flu virus every year is that they evolve very fast.

Carl Zimmer

#13. The extra clutter adds no important insight; instead, it offers more clutter in which erros can lurk.

Carl Zimmer

#14. When you get sick with the flu you get infected with flu viruses and they make lots of new flu viruses, but those new viruses are not exact copies of the old ones. They have mutations in them. A lot of those mutations are harmful.

Carl Zimmer

#15. I wouldn't be a very good hunter without these glasses. I'm not a very good hunter with these glasses, but I'd be even worse without them, so that would put a crimp in how many kids I could have, so all of these medical advances have at least in some parts of the world blunted natural selection.

Carl Zimmer

#16. Viruses don't just make us sick. They can actually sometimes end up in our genomes.

Carl Zimmer

#17. The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#18. Evolution has taught them that pointless harm will ultimately harm themselves.

Carl Zimmer

#19. Everybody can digest milk when they're little.

Carl Zimmer

#20. Dolphins may even be able to name each other with signature whistles. But their society may nevertheless be one of an overlapping network of minds, wandering linked through a transparent ocean.

Carl Zimmer

#21. Evolution is a large political controversy as to what should be taught in the schools. But there is no scientific controversy that we evolved when we talk about evidence from fossils and DNA.

Carl Zimmer

#22. We have Borna virus genes. We're part Borna virus, which is weird, but apparently our cells and our genomes in a weird way might actually be grabbing these viruses, grabbing genetic material from the viruses that are infecting it and pulling them into their own genome.

Carl Zimmer

#23. I like playing with a good crowd.

Sergio Garcia

#24. It used to be thought that only a certain kind of virus could get into our genome and it's called a retrovirus and that's a virus that might be HIV for example.

Carl Zimmer

#25. If the world goes crazy for a lovely fossil, that's fine with me. But if that fossil releases some kind of mysterious brain ray that makes people say crazy things and write lazy articles, a serious swarm of flies ends up in my ointment.

Carl Zimmer

#26. Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#27. We really depend on viruses for our complete survival.

Carl Zimmer

#28. The only kinds of ways we have to deal with viruses are old school, so vaccines for example are very effective, but the first vaccines were invented in the 1700's, so we're talking about technology that is over 200 years-old.

Carl Zimmer

#29. If you're looking for your own idea of your own identity you know the human genome may not be the best place to look for it. You're just looking at a bunch of viruses.

Carl Zimmer

#30. The very word virus began as a contradiction. We inherited the word from the Roman Empire, where it meant, at once, the venom of a snake or the semen of a man. Creation and destruction in one word.

Carl Zimmer

#31. Two hallmarks of Homo Sapiens are decoration and self-identification.

Carl Zimmer

#32. Everybody had to conform, find a mold to fit into. Doctor, lawyer, soldier
it
didn't matter what it was. Once in the mold you had to push forward. Sussex was as helpless as the
next man. Either you managed to do something or you starved in the streets.

Charles Bukowski

#33. About 1.2% of the human genome is made up of genes, things that encode for proteins, the stuff that we consider us. There is about 8.3% that's a virus. In other words we're probably about seven times more virus than we are human genes, which is kind of a weird way to thinking about yourself.

Carl Zimmer

#34. But I don't want to just believe it, I want it to be true.

Audrey Niffenegger