Nandini

“The cancer cell was a broken, deranged machine. Oncogenes were its jammed accelerators and inactivated tumor suppressors its missing brakes.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“Sensible decision making involves acting on the information we have, even while accepting that it may well be imperfect and our decisions may need to be revisited and revised in light of new information.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“Douglas Adams amusingly satirized computer addiction of exactly the kind that hit me. The target of his satire was the programmer who had a particular problem X, which needed solving. He could have written a program in five minutes to solve X and then got on and used his solution. But instead of just doing that, he spent days and weeks writing a more general program that could be used by anybody at any time to solve all similar problems of the general class of X. The fascination lies in the generality and in the purveying of an aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly product for the benefit of a population of hypothetical and very probably non-existent users – not in actually finding the answer to the particular problem X.”
― Richard Dawkins, An Appetite For Wonder: The Making Of A Scientist

“A worm was thus constructed from two kinds of inputs—“intrinsic” inputs from genes, and “extrinsic” inputs from cell-cell interactions. Jokingly, Brenner called it the “British model” versus the “American model.” The British way, Brenner wrote, “is for cells to do their own thing and not to talk to their neighbors very much. Ancestry is what counts, and once a cell is born in a certain place it will stay there and develop according to rigid rules. The American way is quite the opposite. Ancestry does not count. . . . What counts is the interactions with its neighbors. It frequently exchanges information with its fellow cells and often has to move to accomplish its goals and find its proper place.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History