David Quammen Quotes & Sayings

Two aspects of a virus in action: transmissibility and virulence. These — David Quammen

Their result was a model-generated prediction: Given this rate of transmission, given that rate of recovery, given those unrelated mortalities, then . . . an intermediate grade of virulence should come to predominate. Son of a gun, it matched what had happened. — David Quammen

The first rule of a successful parasite? Myxoma's success in Australia suggests something different from that nugget of conventional wisdom I mentioned above. It's not Don't kill your host. It's Don't burn your bridges until after you've crossed them. — David Quammen

Appearances have enormous importance, Mr. Kessler. The creation and maintenance of appearances. Appearances govern. — David Quammen

He hoped these students would learn how to be at home in the desert, not how to conquer it; and he hoped that, in the process, they might discover the spiritual value of quietude. — David Quammen

On April 3, 2014, Jane Goodall turned 80. The iconic blond ponytail has gone gray, but the sparkle of intelligence, sly humor, and fierce dedication still shines from her hazel eyes. — David Quammen

Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation. — David Quammen

Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. Description or law, it challenged the theory of special creation and bruited the idea of evolution in a tone of thunderous innuendo. — David Quammen

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper. — David Quammen

[Theory is] an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally - taking it as their best available view of reality, at least unil some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along. — David Quammen

Ideas - and where facts were scarce, directive questions. Other — David Quammen

Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium. — David Quammen

Identifying the new virus was only step one in solving the immediate mystery of Hendra, let alone understanding the disease in a wider context. Step two would involve tracking that virus to its hiding place. Where did it exist when it wasn't killing horses and people? Step three would entail asking a further cluster of questions: How did the virus emerge from its secret refuge, and why here, and why now? — David Quammen

There was a very important superintendent of Yellowstone, a man who was involved in the founding of the National Park Service itself, Horace Albright. And he became superintendent, which is the boss of Yellowstone Park, in 1919 - from 1919 to 1929. Later, he was director of the park service itself. Albright embraced the idea that in order for the national parks - and Yellowstone in particular - to have support from the American people and from politicians, there needed to be wildlife as spectacle. — David Quammen

RNA viruses are limited to small genomes because their mutation rates are so high, and their mutation rates are so high because they're limited to small genomes. In fact, there's a fancy name for that bind: Eigen's paradox. Manfred Eigen is a German chemist, a Nobel winner, who has studied the chemical reactions that yield self-organization of longer molecules, a process that might lead to life. His paradox describes a size limit for such self-replicating molecules, beyond which their mutation rate gives them too many errors and they cease to replicate. They die out. RNA — David Quammen

It comes and it goes. But epidemiologists have recognized that, with measles virus, as with other pathogens, there's a critical minimum size of the host population, below which it can't persist indefinitely as an endemic, circulating infection. This is known as the critical community size (CCS), an important parameter in disease dynamics. — David Quammen

I'm a white, middle-class male who had a happy childhood in Ohio. The world does not need me to be a novelist. — David Quammen

The more cases of Ebola infection we have, the more chances there are for the virus to mutate in a particular way that adapts it well to living in humans, replicating in humans, and perhaps transmitting from human to human. — David Quammen

Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial. They stand as reminders that not every bad, stubborn, new bug is a virus. — David Quammen

I was a prodigy who learned how difficult writing was only after getting published. I paid my dues later. — David Quammen

Whether you like the label 'Anthropocene' or not, whether you find the prospect of what it signifies inevitable or appalling (or both), the time has come to address its implications, as these thoughtful, battle-tested authors attempt to do. The time has long since come. — David Quammen

Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat. — David Quammen

Kill off the sacred bear. Kill off the ancestral crocodile. Kill off the myth-wrapped tiger. Kill off the lion. You haven't conquered a people, or their place, until you've exterminated their resident monsters. — David Quammen

Two men, on opposite sides of the world, had made the same great discovery at the same time. — David Quammen

Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites. — David Quammen

Humanity badly needs things that are big and fearsome and homicidally wild. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to preserve those few remaining beasts, places, and forces of nature capable of murdering us with sublime indifference. — David Quammen

The elk are the most abundant large herbivores in the Yellowstone ecosystem. There are thousands and thousands of them. They migrate in and out. And those migration routes need to stay open. — David Quammen

Then a very large komodo breaks into view, spooked by our trespass, and scrambles up the vertical face of the bluff, like an alligator scaling a four-story building. — David Quammen

The main problem facing a parasite over the long term, Burnet noted, is the issue of transmission: how to spread its offspring from one individual host to another. Various methods and traits have developed toward that simple end, ranging from massive replication, airborne dispersal, environmentally resistant life-history stages (like the small form of C. burnetii), direct transfer in blood and other bodily fluids, behavioral influence on the host (as exerted by the rabies virus, for instance, causing infected animals to bite), passage through intermediate or amplifier hosts, and the use of insect and arachnid vectors as means of transportation and injection. — David Quammen

Sir Peter Medawar, an eminent British biologist who received a Nobel Prize the same year as Macfarlane Burnet, defined a virus as a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein. — David Quammen

People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We're all in this together. — David Quammen

Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the world and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. That's what I think of as the next big one. — David Quammen

Each outbreak, by this view, represents a local event primarily explicable by a larger cause - the arrival of the wave. The main proponent of the wave idea is Peter D. Walsh, an American ecologist who has worked often in Central Africa and specializes in mathematical theory about ecological facts. I think it's spreading from host to host in a reservoir host, — David Quammen

You can't take a knife on a plane anymore, but you can get on carrying a virus. — David Quammen

Penicillin works by preventing bacteria from building their cell walls. So do its synthetic alternatives, such as amoxicillin. Tetracycline works by interfering with the internal metabolic processes by which bacteria manufacture new proteins for cell growth and replication. — David Quammen

What do we measure when we measure time? The gloomy answer from Hawking, one of our most implacably cheerful scientists, is that we measure entropy. We measure changes and those changes are all for the worse. We measure increasing disorder. Life is hard, says science, and constancy is the greatest of miracles. — David Quammen

Convincing biologic evidence exists for symptomatic chronic B. burgdorferi infection in patients after recommended treatment regimens for Lyme disease. — David Quammen

There's a belief in some cultures that if a person experiences good fortune in financial terms and does not share the good fortune, when that person becomes ill with a mysterious fever and dies, people tend to say: 'Aha! It was because he didn't share. It was the spirits who brought him down.' — David Quammen

Evolution as described by Charles Darwin is an scientific theory, abundantly reconfirmed, explaining physical phenomena by physical causes. Intelligent Design is a faith-based initiative in rhetorical argument. Should we teach I.D. in America's public schools? Yes, let's do - not as science, but alongside other spiritual beliefs, such as Islam, Zoroastrianism and the Hindu Idea that Earth rests on Chukwa, the giant turtle. — David Quammen

If the virus had arrived in a different sort of big city - more loosely governed, full of poor people, lacking first-rate medical institutions - it might have escaped containment and burned through a — David Quammen

Mathematics to me is like a language I don't speak though I admire its literature in translation. — David Quammen

This form of interspecies leap is common, not rare; about 60 percent of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us. — David Quammen

Wallace's sales agent, back in London, heard mutterings from some naturalists that young Mr. Wallace ought to quit theorizing and stick to gathering facts. Besides expressing their condescension toward him in particular, that criticism also reflected a common attitude that fact-gathering, not theory, was the proper business of all naturalists. — David Quammen

When a pathogen leaps from some nonhuman animal into a person, and succeeds there in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis. — David Quammen

Their most telling improvement involved a fundamental parameter: population size of the hosts. — David Quammen

In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak. — David Quammen

Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical. — David Quammen

A few patients do bleed to death, Rollin said, but "they don't explode, and they don't melt." In fact, he said, the conventional term then in use, "Ebola hemorrhagic fever," was itself a misnomer, because more than half the patients don't bleed at all. They die of other causes, such as respiratory distress and shutdown (but not dissolution) of internal organs. It's for just these reasons, as cited by Rollin, that the WHO has switched its own terminology from "Ebola hemorrhagic fever" to "Ebola virus disease. — David Quammen

It testified, I suppose, to the genderless ferocity of her mind." "Why — David Quammen

There's a voice that says: "So what?"
It's not my voice, it's probably not yours, but it makes itself heard in the arenas of public opinion, querulous and smug and fortified by just a little knowledge, which as always is a dangerous thing. "So what if a bunch of species go extinct?" It says. "Extinction is a natural process. Darwin himself said so, didn't he? Extinction is the complement of evolution, making room for new species to evolve. There have always been extinctions. So why worry about these extinctions currently being caused by humanity?" And there has always been a pilot light burning in your furnace. So why worry when your house is on fire? — David Quammen

It wasn't a petty squabble. It was a big squabble, in which pettiness played no small part. — David Quammen

Then there was a new epidemic - of fear," said Dr. Sam Okware, Commissioner of Health Services, when I visited him in Kampala a month later. Among Dr. Okware's other duties, he served as chairman of the national Ebola virus task force. "That was the most difficult to contain," he said. "There was a new epidemic - of panic. — David Quammen

Among the most important things to remember about evolution - and about its primary mechanism, natural selection, as limned by Darwin and his successors - is that it doesn't have purposes. It only has results. To — David Quammen

Horses aren't native to Australia. They are exotic, first brought there by European settlers barely more than two centuries ago. Hendra is probably an old virus, according to the runic evidence of its genome, as read by molecular evolutionists. — David Quammen

Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed. — David Quammen

What are they called? Sprackles, shakums, edible sequins, glossy sugar deedeebobs, I don't know. Instead of sprinkling them on a cookie, I sprinkle them on Angel de la Guarda. — David Quammen

If you're Maasai Mara National Park in Kenya, if you're in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, you don't get out of your vehicle and go walking around amid the lions and the leopards. You stay in your Land Rover. You stay in your safari van, and you look out the windows or you look out the pop top at these animals. I know by experience how badly that can work out if you violate those guidelines. — David Quammen

Disappointment, in science, is sometimes a gateway to insight. — David Quammen

Most Americans know nothing about the African forest, and it seems to them a very scary, spooky dangerous place. I've spent a lot of time in the forests of central Africa. I know they're beautiful places that contain a lot of different kinds of creatures, including some that carry Ebola. — David Quammen

One animal died and, after it tested positive for Reston virus, forty-nine others housed in the same room were "euthanized" as a precaution. (Most of those, tested posthumously, were negative.) Ten employees who had helped unload and handle the monkeys were also screened for infection, and they also tested negative, but none of them were euthanized. — David Quammen

The next day, William Lanney's much abused remains were carried in a coffin to the cemetery. The crowd of mourners was large. It included many of Lanney's shipmates, suggesting that the whaling profession in late-nineteenth-century Hobart was graced with a higher level of humanistic sensibility than the surgical profession. — David Quammen

The protein wrap is known as a capsid. The — David Quammen

Continuation of the outbreak depended on the likelihood of encounters between people who were infectious and people who could be infected. This idea became known as the "mass action principle." It was all about math. The same year, 1906, a Scottish physician named John Brownlee proposed an alternate view, contrary to Hamer's. Brownlee worked as a clinician and hospital administrator — David Quammen

We should recognize that they reflect things that we're doing, not just things that are happening to us. We should understand that, although some of the human-caused factors may seem virtually inexorable, others are within our control. — David Quammen

a mutation in that strain might have made it especially aggressive, efficient, transmissible, and fierce. — David Quammen

A plate of Ebola virions mixed with Hendra virions would resemble capellini in a light sauce of capers. — David Quammen

One of the things that's particularly nefarious about Ebola is that it continues to live in a dead person for some period of time after death. A person who's been dead for a day or two may still be seething with Ebola virus. — David Quammen

We're shaking loose viruses and dislodging them from their natural ecological limitations, places where they aren't very abundant and have competition, even within a single animal. We introduce them into a new, rich habitat called the human population, where they can flourish more abundantly and cause more trouble. — David Quammen

Heatstroke is an important and useful addition to the library on climate change, bringing insights from deep-time ecological research to help illuminate the dire forecasts of which we're already so aware. — David Quammen

One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills - maybe even the cough - precede the major discharge of virus toward other people. Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this seems to have been true. That order of events allowed many SARS cases to be recognized, hospitalized, and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren't emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode - not just lucky but salvational. — David Quammen

Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims (as Hendra does) or a few hundred (Ebola) in this place or that, and then disappearing for years. — David Quammen

A high jeopardy of extinction comes with territory. Islands are where species go to die. — David Quammen

Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out. Nearly all zoonotic diseases result from infection by one of six kinds of pathogen: viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists (a group of — David Quammen

Most bacteriologists were trained as medical men - Burnet himself had been, before going into bacteriological research - and "their interest in general biological problems was very limited." They cared about curing and preventing diseases, which was well and good; less so about pondering infection as a biological phenomenon, a relationship between creatures, equal in fundamental importance to such other relationships as predation, competition, and decomposition. — David Quammen

To study its effect on a living, struggling human body, he meant. To do that, you would need the right combination of hospital facilities, BSL-4 facilities, dedicated and expert professionals, and circumstances. You couldn't do it during the next outbreak at a mission clinic in an African village. You would need to bring Ebola virus into captivity - into a research situation, under highly controlled scrutiny - and not just in the form of frozen samples. You would need to study a raging infection inside somebody's body. That isn't easy to arrange. He added: "We haven't had an Ebola patient yet in the US." But for everything that happens, there is a first time. — David Quammen

But private lands development around the periphery of the parks - Grand Teton and Yellowstone - is a crucial issue because if those private lands are transformed from open pastures, meadow, forest land to suburbs, to little ranchettes, to shopping malls, to roads, to Starbucks - if those places are all settled for the benefit of humans, then the elk are not going to be able to migrate in and out of Yellowstone Park anymore. And if the elk can't migrate into the park, then that creates problems for the wolves, for the grizzlies, for a lot of other creatures. — David Quammen

The order Chiroptera (the "hand-wing" creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat. Such — David Quammen

Not only are islands impoverished relative to the mainlands, but small islands are more severely impoverished than large ones. That bit of insight became famed as the species-area relationship. — David Quammen

You can hike into the Yellowstone backcountry. You can camp in the Yellowstone backcountry. You can take food into the Yellowstone backcountry, and you're surrounded by grizzly bears. And it's - it's a very, very thrilling, peculiar situation. Every sound that you hear in the night, you wonder is this a grizzly bear coming to tear into my tent? — David Quammen

Results "are no good unless they answer (or can be made to seem to answer, or can be twisted and wrenched and piled into odd shapes until they hint at being somehow perhaps on the verge or answering) a question that someone might conceivably want asked." — David Quammen

Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern - rising to a high case count, fading away, rising again after a certain interval — David Quammen

Know that walking into a small woodlot," he wrote, "is riskier than walking into a nearby large, extensive forest. — David Quammen

I thought 'The Hot Zone' was fascinating, mesmerizing. It's one of the things that got me interested in Ebola. — David Quammen

People come into our lives and then they go out again. The entropy law, as applied to human relations. Sometimes in their passing, though, they register an unimagined and far-reaching influence, as I suspect Hughes Rudd did upon me. There is no scientific way to discern such effects, but memory believes before knowing remembers. And the past lives coiled within the present, beyond sight, beyond revocation, lifting us up or weighting us down, sealed away
almost completely
behind walls of pearl. — David Quammen

The most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens. — David Quammen

SIR model, representing a flow of individuals, during the course of an outbreak, through those three classes I mentioned earlier: from susceptible (S) to infected (I) to recovered (R). Anderson — David Quammen

Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it — David Quammen

By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy. — David Quammen

When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like an angel of death. — David Quammen

Islands are where species go to die. — David Quammen

Britain's Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens had lately reclassified herpes B into biohazard level 4, placing it in the elite company of Ebola, Marburg, and the virus that causes Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. National — David Quammen

Herpes B is a very rare infection in humans but a nasty one, with a case fatality rate of almost 70 percent among those few dozen people infected during the twentieth century (before recent breakthroughs in antiviral pharmaceutics) and almost 50 percent even since then. When — David Quammen

And so in 1975, the grizzly bear was put on, as I said - on the endangered species list as threatened. And new measures were taken, for instance, bear-proofing garbage, creating new regulations to - essentially to try and keep people and people's food away from the bears, let the bears adjust to eating the abundant wild food that's available in Yellowstone and allow them to be more wild, to be independent of humans as sources of foods for the good of both sides. And that has been quite successful. — David Quammen

To drown a river beneath its own impounded water, by damming, is to kill what it was and to settle for something else. When the damming happens without good reason ... then it's a tragedy of diminishment for the whole planet, a loss of one more wild thing, leaving Earth just a little flatter and tamer and simpler and uglier than before. — David Quammen

The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast - above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill - has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now. — David Quammen

Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal. — David Quammen

Viruses face four basic challenges: how to get from one host to another, how to penetrate a cell within that host, how to commandeer the cell's equipment and resources for producing multiple copies of itself, and how to get back out - out of the cell, out of the host, on to the next. A — David Quammen

Onward we climb. The upper slope is a crust of friable lava. It crunches like peanut brittle beneath our steps. — David Quammen

Advisory: If your husband catches an ebolavirus, give him food and water and love and maybe prayers but keep your distance, wait patiently, hope for the best-- and, if he dies, don't clean out his bowels by hand. Better to step back, blow a kiss, and burn the hut. — David Quammen

The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning. — David Quammen