Stephen S. Hall > Quotes

“Attraction to fear is a kind of hunger.”
― Stephen S. Hall, Slither: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World

“But the initial drama lies in what didn’t make it into the paper. To start, there was the loud, rancorous cell phone argument that broke out as Hamidreza Marvi, the lead author on the eventual study, stood in line for final boarding of a plane at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport for a trip to Arizona to catch the rattlesnakes to be used in the experiment. “Whoever’s on the other end is just screaming at him, in Farsi, so I have no idea what anyone’s talking about,” recalled Joseph Mendelson, one of Marvi’s traveling companions. Mendelson could tell Marvi was agitated, but insisted he hang up because the flight was going to leave. It was then that Marvi, born and educated in Iran, sheepishly admitted, “That was my mother. She just figured out the real reason we’re going to Arizona.”
― Stephen S. Hall, Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World

“Part of the enduring mythology about Asklepios, the god of healing, is that he may have acquired his prodigious healing powers when a snake whispered its secrets into his ear. Modern science is recapitulating this ancient transfer of biological wisdom, with snakes now whispering molecular secrets. But our contemporary demigods of molecular biology might revisit Pindar’s account of Asklepios’s ultimate fate as a healer: smote by that thunderbolt hurled by Zeus to erase the possibility of immortalization in the world of mortals. Even nature’s stop signs are there for a reason.”
― Stephen S. Hall, Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World

“Even though January is not considered prime hunting season, we had reason to be cautiously optimistic. The week before I joined her in the field, Kalil had a banner day, snagging four big pythons, including a 13-footer; three of the captures were females, and among them she counted 100 eggs (she has been known to use python eggs to bake Christmas cookies). “This woman is incredible, she gets the snakes to come to her,” said Rodriguez, who met Kalil when she was PTA president and he was PTA treasurer at the middle school their kids attended in Miami.”
― Stephen S. Hall, Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World

“Put another way, after a century-plus of obsession with male genitalia by German anatomists like Gadow, “titans” of American science like E. D. Cope, and celebrated reptile curators like Raymond Ditmars and all the other “snake guys,” we only learned in the last couple years from the “snake gals” that female snakes might actually have evolved a genital structure that allows them to enjoy copulation—despite, or perhaps because of, forced copulation with males that have as many penile doohickeys as a Swiss Army knife.”
― Stephen S. Hall, Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World

“When I was thirty I began my life; at forty I was self-assured; at fifty I understood my place in the vast scheme of things; at sixty I learned to give up arguing; and now at seventy I can do whatever I like without disrupting my life.”
― Stephen S. Hall, Wisdom

“Gracheva and her two colleagues couldn’t help but notice disquieting signs of the danger they were about to confront as they stole glances at members of the serpentarium staff. Some had disfigured fingers and hands, others had divot-like cavities in their limbs, yet another appeared partially paralyzed—all the result of accidental snakebites. They weren’t in fruit fly country anymore.”
― Stephen S. Hall, Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World

“most people are generally unaware of the dramatic ways snake venoms have contributed to human well-being—not just in terms of basic research, but in the contents of millions of pill bottles in medicine cabinets all over the planet.”
― Stephen S. Hall, Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World

“It’s not innate!” insisted Whit Gibbons, the well-known South Carolina naturalist and writer. He described visiting a group of students about 10 years old with their parents and passing around his ambassador snakes. “And I said, ‘Okay, before we looked at all these snakes, how many of you were kind of scared of snakes or a little bit timid about them?’ And most people were. And I said, ‘How many of you now like snakes?’ Nearly all of them put their hands up, except one. That was a little girl. She put her hand up, and her mother pulled her hand down. Does that tell you something about where our fear of snakes comes from?”
― Stephen S. Hall, Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World

“Snakes find a way to survive. Snakes have always found a way to survive. They’ve been doing it for 100 million years or so. If they have to live in an arid, hot desert, they figure it out. If they have to live in tropical jungles, they figure it out. If they have to live in salt water, they figure it out. If they have to adjust to the colder temperatures of North America, or the ultimately warmer temperatures of climate change, they will figure it out. Without limbs, without metabolically warmed blood, without ears, without eating sometimes for as long as a year, they figure it out, and, in those rare moments when we actually manage to see their cryptic forms, they grace us with a glimpse of resilience and the unearthly, eternal beauty of survival.”
― Stephen S. Hall, Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World

“patrons of the Snake Center Cafe now pay about 1,650 yen to have servers bring a live tame snake to their table to handle while they sip their coffee or tea.)”
― Stephen S. Hall, Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World

“Long before Burmese pythons got to Florida, construction of the Tamiami Trail devastated the ecology of the Everglades, according to both local indigenous people and conservationists. In connecting Tampa and Miami, the road blocked the natural north-to-south flow of water in the Everglades, effectively damming the wetlands and dramatically altering the habitat. The initial 1924 construction made an incision that engineers only now, a century later, are attempting to repair. Multiply this by 1 million, or 4 million, miles of highway in the continental US alone, and you begin to see the scope of habitat destruction and ecological disruption.”
― Stephen S. Hall, Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World

“they’ve found that pythons and other snakes have evolved an almost bizarro-world, alternative form of biochemical processing that may ultimately affect our understanding of diabetes, cancer, and the ability to regenerate organs and tissues. In a postmodern update of the Asklepios myth, perfectly adapted to our genomic age, the snakes have begun to whisper molecular secrets of potential healing.”
― Stephen S. Hall, Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World

“At a time when roughly 40 percent of Americans do not accept the notion of evolution, the pythons that survived the Big Freeze in Florida appear to believe in it 100 percent. The take-home genomics message from the snakes is that evolution is real, it’s apparently happening at blindingly fast speed,”
― Stephen S. Hall, Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World