Benacerraf Baruj Quotes & Sayings

I loved to learn everything, everything in sight, and I was never satisfied that I knew everything there was to know in each of my courses. — Gertrude B. Elion

As biologists, we contemplate with admiration and awe the wondrous array of sophisticated cell interactions and recognitions evolved in the T cell immune system, which must be a model for other similarly complex biological systems of highly differentiated organisms. — Baruj Benacerraf

But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge. — Carl Sagan

You can't tie water down. Watern can be difficult to love too, because it moves around anything trying to contain it. It can overflow its banks and lose its sense of home. — Katie Kacvinsky

In their secretly nervous hearts, they've convinced themselves, poor little delusional narcissists, that their nation is the most powerful that ever was or even will be, ignoring the still vaster empires that have crumbled in the past, conveniently forgetting that the U.S. has only existed for a mere 225 years, and refusing to consider for a nanosecond that in another 225 years it very well might be gone.
*Stubblefield commentary, on patriotic American citizens in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. — Tom Robbins

My interest was directed, from my medical student days, to Immunology, and particularly to the mechanism of hypersensitivity. I had suffered from bronchial asthma as a child and had developed a deep curiosity in allergic phenomena. — Baruj Benacerraf

He was big, that Sid. He was a force, a character, and I wondered fleetingly if Sally and I would ever seem as big to our offspring as Sid had seemed to us. — Martha Moody

With fear of stating the obvious: Freedom belongs to 'We the People,' not 'They the Politicians.' — John Ridley

The immune system has evolved the capacity to react specifically with a very large number of foreign molecules with which it had no previous contact while avoiding reactivity for autologous molecules, naturally antigenic in other species or in other individuals of the same species. — Baruj Benacerraf

Women have many faults, but the worst of them all is that they are too pleased with themselves and take too little pains to please the men. — Plautus

There are always things I find difficult - being in crowds, remembering faces. I do like routines. I always travel with someone. My life in Avignon is a very quiet one. I have an apartment that looks over the whole city. I can drop into town, but a lot of the time I write from home. In some respects I still live a very quiet, simple life. — Daniel Tammet

The ear of the bridled horse is in the mouth. — Horace

What's great about music is it takes so many kinds of people, including me. Everybody is in a different place. — Jewel

While in medical school, I was drafted into the U.S. Army with the other medical students as part of the wartime training program, and naturalized American citizen in 1943. I greatly enjoyed my medical studies, which at the Medical College of Virginia were very clinically oriented. — Baruj Benacerraf

My primary and secondary education was in French, which had a lasting influence on my life. — Baruj Benacerraf

The identification of the genes which determine biological phenomena and the study of the control they exert on these phenomena has proven to be the most successful approach to a detailed understanding of the mechanism of biological processes. — Baruj Benacerraf

Some of the most significant advances in molecular biology have relied upon the methodology of genetics. The same statement may be made concerning our understanding of immunological phenomena. — Baruj Benacerraf

In 1970, Dean Robert Ebert offered me the Chair of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. I moved to Harvard because I missed the university environment and, more particularly, the stimulating interaction with the eager, enthusiastic, and unprejudiced young minds of the students and fellows. — Baruj Benacerraf

Many people are good at talking about what they are doing, but in fact do little. Others do a lot but don't talk about it; they are the ones who make a community live. — Jean Vanier