Morteza Karami

“Leonardo said so himself. “Intellectual passion drives out sensuality,” he wrote in one of his notebooks.”
― Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci

“But in the years that followed, science journalists the world over began expressing their disappointment in the contribution that knowledge of our complete DNA sequence had made to medicine. Although decoding our own instruction book is an irrefutable achievement that has made a difference to treatments for several important illnesses, it has not revealed as much as we expected about the causes of many common diseases. Searching for genetic differences in common to people with a particular disease did not throw up straightforward links for as many conditions as had been expected. Often, conditions were weakly linked to tens or hundreds of gene variants, but rarely was it the case that possessing a given gene variant would lead directly to a given disease.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“I always like to imagine being a South African policeman who likely couldn’t tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese but whose job was to make sure that people of the wrong color weren’t doing the wrong thing. If he saw an Asian person sitting on a whites-only bench, what would he say? “Hey, get off that bench, you Chinaman!” “Excuse me. I’m Japanese.” “Oh, I apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to be racist. Have a lovely afternoon.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“In fact, gastrointestinal symptoms are surprisingly common in people with mental health and neurological conditions, though they are usually seen as unimportant compared with the altered behaviour.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness