Life Sciences Quotes

“Our primary emphasis isn’t on physics and chemistry; it’s on the sciences of life.”
“Is that a matter of principle?”
“Not entirely. It’s also a matter of convenience and economic necessity. We don’t have the money for large-scale research in physics and chemistry, and we don’t really have any practical need for that kind of research—no heavy industries to be made more competitive, no armaments to be made more diabolical, not the faintest desire to land on the backside of the moon. Only the modest ambition to live as fully human beings in harmony with the rest of life on this island at this latitude on this planet. We can take the results of your researches in physics and chemistry and apply them, if we want to or can afford it, to our own purposes. Meanwhile we’ll concentrate on the research which promises to do us the greatest good—in the sciences of life and mind.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Stopping in the 1970s, "Hybridity" as the fifth and final chapter is less of an end point than a certain realization of the artifice, plasticity, and technology that Wells and Loeb envisioned as the future of the human relationship to living matter as well as of the "catastrophic" situation that Georges Canghuilhem (following Kurt Goldstein) saw in life subjected to the milieu of the laboratory.”
― Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies

“Not to use bacteria as model organisms for more complex animals, but the reverse: to literally make complex animals more like their model organisms, by making living matter conform to the shape, time, and technical forms of simpler experimental models.”
― Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies

“Aboveground portions of a plant represent only “the tip of an iceberg.”
― Lincoln Taiz; Eduardo Zeiger, Plant Physiology by Lincoln Taiz