A Quote by Elizabeth Blackburn

Perhaps arising from a fascination with animals, biology seemed the most interesting of sciences to me as a child. — © Elizabeth Blackburn
Perhaps arising from a fascination with animals, biology seemed the most interesting of sciences to me as a child.
It is ... a sign of the times-though our brothers of physics and chemistry may smile to hear me say so-that biology is now a science in which theories can be devised: theories which lead to predictions and predictions which sometimes turn out to be correct. These facts confirm me in a belief I hold most passionately-that biology is the heir of all the sciences.
My fascination is broadly with biology and the fact that our increased understanding of biology allows for breakthroughs in a broad set of diseases.
The social sciences, like much of biology but unlike most fields of the physical sciences, have to deal with structures of essential complexity, i.e. with structures whose characteristic properties can be exhibited only by models made up of relatively large numbers of variables.
I'm not sure what gave me empathy for animals, but I do know that I have always loved animals since I was a very young child. I always felt a need to nurture and protect them. Perhaps I could see they needed that, and caring for them made me happy.
I studied what the Germans call the Naturwissenschaften, the natural sciences. Everything from biology to geology. How the clouds are formed, how the animals live, and what makes the rocks. So I know about nature. Period.
Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.
Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.
Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical.Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind.
I took biology in high school and didn't like it at all. It was focused on memorization. ... I didn't appreciate that biology also had principles and logic ... [rather than dealing with a] messy thing called life. It just wasn't organized, and I wanted to stick with the nice pristine sciences of chemistry and physics, where everything made sense. I wish I had learned sooner that biology could be fun as well.
Fly flight is just a great phenomenon to study. It has everything - from the most sophisticated sensory biology; really, really interesting physics; really interesting muscle physiology; really interesting neural computations.
As a child, I remember my own intensive interest in biology, birds, other animals and flowers and was determined at an early age to become a scientist.
If belief in evolution is a requirement to be a real scientist, it’s interesting to consider a quote from Dr. Marc Kirschner, founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School: “In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all.
There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history that can occur but once in their detailed glory. And for those kinds of sciences, be it cosmology, or evolutionary biology, or geology, or palaeontology, the experimental methods, simplification, quantification, prediction and repetition of the experimental sciences don't always work. You have to go with the narrative, the descriptive methods of what? Of historians.
What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.
I was an only child. Growing up, we moved a lot, so I didn't have any close friends. So the animals I was around as a child - dogs, cats, and horses, and stuffed animals - became my family and friends. The only strong bonds I made as a child were with animals.
There is another domain that we consider relevant and having good prospects - marine biology. For many years this region [Russian Far East] has been home for one of the leading institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Marine Biology.
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