Carl Zimmer · 306 pages
Rating: (4.1K votes)
“Some ancient eukaryote swallowed a photosynthesizing bacteria and became a sunlight gathering alga. Millions of years later one of these algae was devoured by a second eukaryote. This new host gutted the alga, casting away its nucleus and its mitochondria, keeping only the chloroplast. That thief of a thief was the ancestor or Plasmodium and Toxoplasma. And this Russian-doll sequence of events explains why you can cure malaria with an antibiotic that kills bacteria: because Plasmodium has a former bacterium inside it doing some vital business.”
― Carl Zimmer, quote from Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
“Evolution has taught them that pointless harm will ultimately harm themselves.”
― Carl Zimmer, quote from Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
“From Lankaster to Lorenz, scientists have gotten it wrong. Parasites are complex, highly adapted creatures that are at the heart of the story of life. If there hadn't been such high walls dividing scientists who study life - the zoologists, the immunologists, the mathematical biologists, the ecologists - parasites might have been recognized sooner as not disgusting, or at least not merely disgusting. If parasites were so feeble, so lazy, how was it that they could manage to live inside every free-living species and infect billions of people? How could they change with time so that medicines that could once treat them became useless? How could parasites defy vaccines, which could corral brutal killers like smallpox and polio?”
― Carl Zimmer, quote from Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
“parasites make up the majority of species on Earth. According to one estimate, parasites may outnumber free-living species four to one. In other words, the study of life is, for the most part, parasitology. The book in your”
― Carl Zimmer, quote from Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
“It is we who are the parasites, and Earth the host”
― Carl Zimmer, quote from Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
“When Europeans colonized Africa, they helped trigger giant epidemics by forcing people to stay and work in tsetse-infested places. In 1906, Winston Churchill, who was the colonial undersecretary at the time, told the House of Commons that one sleeping sickness epidemic had reduced the population of Uganda from 6.5 million to 2.5 million.”
― Carl Zimmer, quote from Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
Carl Zimmer
Born place: in New Haven, CT, The United States
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“suppose they began to worry about the health of the Japanese currency, the yen, in which bonds are denominated and in which the interest is paid. In such circumstances, the price of the bond would drop as nervous investors sold off their holdings. Buyers would only be found at a price low enough to compensate them for the increased risk of a Japanese default or currency depreciation.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
“Images can fade. Sounds and smells disappear from our memory. But our heart forgets nothing. A child’s soul knows everything.”
― Jan-Philipp Sendker, quote from A Well-Tempered Heart
“When he cares about someone, he cares about them with everything. And he takes, losing someone he cares about, badly.' 'His mom?' 'Holy crap! He told you about his mom? Shit, he does like you. Just do't break his heart now that he's finally got it working, please.' 'I don't think I have the power to do that.' 'Oh, you'd be surprised.”
― Samantha Towle, quote from Trouble
“I remember about the inside of the house,” Joel went on, “was that the radio wasn’t playing—it was buzzing, like it was picking up static. Anyway, we got out of the house and decided to run up to the university campus to call somebody. I’ll never forget that. There were dogs outside, and when they saw us running, they started to run with us too. But when they got close, they ran backwards! And the birds—as we ran along, the whole woods were full of screeching birds!”
― quote from The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren
“But in the mouth of Mother Nature's fury, Ethan's totally at ease, and I wonder if it's because he's studied weather for years, or because he figured out a long time ago that the things that really hurt you don't usually fall from the sky.”
― Lara Zielin, quote from The Waiting Sky
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