Harish Vaidyanathan

“Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“history books tell us that the use of steel weapons and guns versus those fashioned of stone or wood safeguarded European victories. The real reason that European colonizers displaced or destroyed indigenous peoples, however, was largely a matter of disease and differing immunities. It was the dissemination of exotic European germs and foreign mosquitoes and their diseases unconsciously acting as biological weapons that sounded the death knell for indigenous peoples.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“Infectious diseases cause a rise in oxidative stress, which is largely responsible for coordinating our genetic response to the infection. As we age, mitochondrial respiration also causes a rise in oxidative stress, which activates essentially the same genes through a common mechanism that involves transcription factors like NFΚB. Unlike infections, however, ageing is not easily reversed: mitochondrial damage accumulates continuously. The stress response and inflammation therefore persist, and this creates a harsh environment for the expression of ‘normal’ genes. The expression of normal genes in an oxidized environment is the basis of their negative pleiotropic effects in old age”
― Nick Lane, Oxygen: The molecule that made the world

“In life, we have to fulfil both—the expectations we have been born into and those we have made for ourselves.”
― Aditya Iyengar, The Thirteenth Day