What I was concerned with was life: what are the major features that are common to all living organisms that subtly define life. So I looked at the whole problem as a chemist, as a biochemist, and as a molecular biologist.
The mechanist is intimately convinced that a precise knowledge of the chemical constitution, structure, and properties of the various organelles of a cell will solve biological problems. This will come in a few centuries. For the time being, the biologist has to face such concepts as orienting forces or morphogenetic fields. Owing to the scarcity of chemical data and to the complexity of life, and despite the progresses of biochemistry, the biologist is still threatened with vertigo.
I guess when you take a look at the book 'Atlas Shrugged,' I think most people always like to identify with the main character - that would be John Galt. I guess I identify with Hank Rearden, the fella that just refused until the very end to give up.
Well, one of the things we're supposed to be able to do as playwrights is write from a place of empathy, get into another character's shoes and experience things both mundane and tragic. And people don't - like me right now - people aren't necessarily the most eloquent when trying to express their emotions. I guess I feel as a playwright that those people deserve a voice, too, a voice that isn't so articulate that they themselves can no longer identify with it.
I think we identify ourselves by labels or things that we are able to do: I am this. I am a good cook. I am a good mother. I am a good this. I am a good doctor. I am a good lawyer. When you can’t do those things anymore, you wonder where your identity is.
There are lots and lots of challenges that I wished - at the time - that I had done.There are lots of occasions where there were exciting things to be done but for some reason or another it was physically impossible for us to do them. I still wouldn't mind if I was able to go down into this most impressive valley in the Antarctic, but of course those things are beyond me now.
Much of my work in biology has been driven by my early training in chemistry. When studying a new chemical compound, the first and most important thing is to determine its detailed molecular structure.
The fountain of youth for me, let’s see…I guess it’s exercise, healthy diet, lots of water, lots of laughter, lots of sex — yes, sex, we need that as human beings. It’s healthy, it’s natural, it’s what we are here to do!
Well, on lots of small things we could have done better, but on all the big things we called it right. You should make less mistakes as you get older, and I became a councillor back in 1971, so if by this stage in politics I'm making lots of big mistakes, then I shouldn't be here.
In thermodynamics as well as in other branches of molecular physics , the laws of phenomena have to a certain extent been anticipated, and their investigation facilitated, by the aid of hypotheses as to occult molecular structures and motions with which such phenomena are assumed to be connected. The hypothesis which has answered that purpose in the case of thermodynamics, is called that of "molecular vortices," or otherwise, the "centrifugal theory of elasticity.
I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.
Primates stand at a turning point in the course of evolution. Primates are to the biologist what viruses are to the biochemist. They can be analysed and partly understood according to the rules of a simpler discipline, but they also present another level of complexity: viruses are living chemicals, and primates are animals who love and hate and think.
We'd traveled, we'd been to lots of parties, lots of movies and concerts, we'd slept in. We'd done all those things that people with children seem to miss so passionately. We didn't want those things anymore. We wanted a baby.
I am called an environmentalist a lot. But I don't necessarily identify with that word specifically, because of the compartmentalization of the so-called environmental movement.
I identify as an agent when I'm agenting, and I identify as an author when I'm writing. I expect both those things to be true for as long as I'm able to do them.
I don't often meet people who want to suffer cardiovascular disease or whatever, and we get those things as a result of the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage.