By the time I was 12 or 13, I was studying biochemistry textbooks.
I chose biochemistry as my major and graduated after 4 years with an Honours degree in Biochemistry. During that time, I had come to love biochemistry research, although I was just getting my feet wet in laboratory research.
I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are, and to look where things have gone missing.
There was a time when Stefan Zweig was the most widely read author in the world. He was lionized everywhere, translated into every language. For the first four decades of the 20th century, his novellas and biographies were devoured by rich and poor, young and old, well read or less so.
For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.
In moments of transcendence, when time stands still, your biological clock will stop. The spirit is that domain of our awareness where there is no time.
'Time Magazine' declared Hillary Clinton the 'perfect' age to be president because she's a postmenopausal woman who is 'biologically primed' to lead.
I'm friends with James Cameron. We've spent time together over the years because he is a diver and explorer and in his heart of hearts a biologist. We run into each other at scientific conferences.
One thing bothered me as a student. In the 1960s, human behavior was totally off limits for the biologist. There was animal behavior, then there was a long time nothing, after which came human behavior as a totally separate category best left to a different group of scientists.
Mathematicians have been hiding and writing messages in the genetic code for a long time, but it's clear they were mathematicians and not biologists because, if you write long messages with the code that the mathematicians developed, it would more than likely lead to new proteins being synthesized with unknown functions.
Evolutionary biologists have long pondered the phenomenon of the changing colours of autumn leaves. Itβs possible that the red pigments are manufactured in the leaf as a side-effect of something else thatβs happening at this time.
For the vast majority of world history, human life - both culture and biology - was shaped by scarcity. Food, clothing, shelter, tools, and pretty much everything else had to be farmed or fabricated, at a very high cost in time and energy.
In 1986, I was asked by the then-Dean of Science at the University of British Columbia, Dr. R.C. Miller, Jr., to establish a new interdisciplinary institute, the Biotechnology Laboratory. I decided that it was time for me to start paying back for the thirty years of fun that I had been able to have in research.
Each and every time I went in for IVF treatments, I knew there was a bipartisan group of Congresswomen praying for me, and I was honored that the same group was there at my baby shower.
Houston's been getting flooded for a very long time. We always have to prepare for disasters and we have to do this in a very bipartisan way.
If ever there was a time for true bipartisanship, it is today.
We want to conquer the world and have 1,000 likes, 1 million likes, but at the same time, we are depressed. We are lonely, but we have 10,000 followers. We are all bipolar.
My personal style is bipolar. Sometimes I feel like dressing in a boyish leather jacket; other times I want to dress more elegantly. Most of the time it's what I like to call 'comfortable chic': Giuseppe Zanotti flat sandals, Rag & Bone jeans, slouchy Isabel Marant shirts.
It's more common than not that bipolar illness will start in the teens. One of the reasons I spend a lot of time on college campuses is exactly that reason. It's terribly important to talk to students about knowing these things in advance.
