Quotes & Sayings About Human Cells

It's hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows she the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it. — Karen Marie Moning

We know very well that we have ancestors. But our ancestors are not only human. We have animal ancestors; we have plant ancestors; and we have mineral ancestors. Our human ancestors are still very young. Human beings appeared very late in the history of life on Earth. Our animal ancestors are still there within us. The reptile, the fish, and the ape are still in our blood. Not only were they part of us in the past, but they continue to exist within us. Just look deeply into your cells. We see that we are the whole history of life. — Thich Nhat Hanh

If you are building a thirty-story building and you use worm-eaten wood for the frame, inferior structural supports, and other fourth-rate, low-grade materials, what kind of finished product do you think you will wind up with? No need to answer. So if you're building a human body and the material that will become your blood, bones, skin, organs-indeed, every cell of your body-is inferior and of poor quality, what kind of body do you think you will wind up with? No need to answer. — Harvey Diamond

I am pro-life. I believe human life begins at conception. I also believe that embryonic stem cell research should be encouraged and supported. — Bill Frist

Today, it is research with human embryonic stem cells and attempts to prepare cloned stem cells for research and medical therapies that are being disavowed as being ethically unacceptable. — Paul Berg

The vast majority of abortions are performed between the seventh and tenth week when the baby is already sucking his thumb, recoiling from pricking, responding to sound. All his organs are present, the brain is functioning, the heart is pumping, the liver is making blood cells, the kidneys are cleaning fluids, and there is a fingerprint. His genetic code is uniquely and unquestionably human. And, if we are willing, he can be seen by ultrasound. — John Piper

He believed that technological progress was a disease in human society. The explosive development of technology was analogous to the growth of cancer cells, and the results would be identical: the exhaustion of all sources of nourishment, the destruction of organs, and the final death of the host body. He advocated abolishing crude technologies such as fossil fuels and nuclear energy and keeping gentler technologies such as solar power and small-scale hydroelectric power. He believed in the gradual de-urbanization of modern metropolises by distributing the population more evenly in self-sufficient small towns and villages. Relying on the gentler technologies, he would build a new agricultural society. — Liu Cixin

A team from Sydney, Australia, has lowered levels of these proteins using light. They implanted human genes associated with Alzheimer's into mouse DNA, so that the animals developed abnormal tau proteins and amyloid plaques. Then they treated them for a month with low-level light therapy, simply by holding the light one to two centimeters above the animals' heads. Using the same spectrum of near-infrared light that has helped in traumatic brain injury, Parkinson's disease, and retinal damage, they lowered both the pathological tau proteins and the amyloid plaques by 70 percent in key brain areas that Alzheimer's affects. Thereafter signs of "rusting" decreased, and the mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cells, improved their function. — Norman Doidge

The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go - the complexity of these mathematical models is beyond human comprehension. — Alexander Tsiaras

A human body is a conversation going on, both within the cells and between the cells, and they're telling each other to grow and to die; when you're sick, something's gone wrong with that conversation. — W. Daniel Hillis

My contemplation of life and human nature in that secluded place [cell 54 of Cairo Central Prison] taught me that he who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never, therefore, make any progress. — Anwar Sadat

[And while people ran about proclaiming such things,] I could only think that everything exists because of loss. From the bricks of our buildings, from cement to human cells, everything exists because of chemical transformation, and every chemical transformation is accompanied by loss. And when I look up at the night sky I think: The astronomers have given every star a number. — Anne Michaels

Henrietta's were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory. — Rebecca Skloot

We cannot learn freedom and responsibility within the confines of our own species. We cannot understand life and death and what they are for in exclusively human terms. Without that which is wild, the world becomes a cell block. — Stephanie Mills

Cancer is not something confined to human beings. It's found in all multi cellular organisms where the adult cells proliferate, so it's widespread in the biosphere. It's a phenomenon that is deeply related to the history of life itself, so by studying cancer I think we can illuminate the history of life itself and vice versa. — Paul Davies

Most of our brain cells are glial cells, once thought to be mere support cells, but now understood as having a critical role in brain function. Glial cells in the human brain are markedly different from glial cells in other brains, suggesting that they may be important in the evolution of brain function. — Thomas R. Insel

I Am Primate

I was once taught, that I am a soul in a body.
I once believed I was separate from the earth.
A stranger in a strange land,
a sinner in need of a Savior.
But, isn't this my home? This beautiful world?
Isn't this my form?
These hands, these eyes, this touch?
Am I to believe I have violated a rule,
just by being born?
Who claims this right to judge,
and on what authority do you stand?
The truth screams out from my cells.
I am not the imagination of a God,
I am a voice in the earth,
I am that which you deny!
The earth is my home and the stars my destiny.
I will touch the planets through
the hands of my children
. . . not the will of your ghost!
I am a voice in the evolutionary continuum
and I claim the right to be alive,
without your story.
For I Am Human, I Am Proud,
and I AM . . . PRIMATE! — Christopher Zzenn Loren

Look at all this. It's fantastic. A hundred thousand worlds. What I love most, because I'm a hideous narcissist, is knowing many of these worlds are mine. You know what all of this is, don't you? This is the immune system of the human soul. Superheroes, space rangers, time cowboys, they are the T cells of the spirit. They were always here to save us. We made them to save us. — Bob Proehl

I've tried to imagine how she'd feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I'm pretty sure that she - like most of us - would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. — Rebecca Skloot

There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over. — Richard Dawkins

I'm putting back into the self the responsibility for the collective life. If each one of us took very seriously the fact that every little act, every little word we utter, every injury we do to another human being is really what is projected into larger issues; if we could once begin to think of it that way, then each one of us, like a small cell, would do the work of creating a human self, a kind of self who wouldn't have ghettos, a kind of self that wouldn't go to war. Then we could begin to have the cell which would influence and enormous amount of cells around you. I don't think we can measure the radius of the personal influence of one person, within the home, outside of the home, in the neighborhood, and finally in national affairs. — Anais Nin

Nearly seven years after Moore originally filed suit, the Supreme Court of California ruled against him in what became the definitive statement on this issue: When tissues are removed from your body, with or without your consent, any claim you might have had to owning them vanishes. When you leave tissues in a doctor's office or a lab, you abandon them as waste, and anyone can take your garbage and sell it. Since Moore had abandoned his cells, they were no longer a product of his body, the ruling said. They had been "transformed" into an invention and were now the product of Golde's "human ingenuity" and "inventive effort. — Rebecca Skloot

human red blood cells have no nuclei and thus possess no DNA of their own. — Tara Rodden Robinson

I looked up "skin" in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body's largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just the gateway to physical or spiritual depths but a profoundly important web of cells that, in protecting us, gives us form and function. — Lauren Slater

There are something like 18 billion cells in the brain alone. There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your instructions and your guidance from others, but you must find your own path. — Joseph Campbell

Everyone in the audience knew what that meant. On top of saying they'd possibly wasted more than a decade and millions of research dollars, Gartler was also suggesting that spontaneous transformation - one of the most celebrated prospects for finding a cure for cancer - might not exist. Normal cells didn't spontaneously become cancerous, he said; they were simply taken over by HeLa. — Rebecca Skloot

Metabolically active cells, such as those of the liver, kidneys, muscles, and brain, have hundreds or thousands of mitochondria, making up some 40 per cent of the cytoplasm. The egg cell, or oocyte, is exceptional: it passes on around 100000 mitochondria to the next generation. In contrast, blood cells and skin cells have very few, or none at all; sperm usually have fewer than 100. All in all, there are said to be 10 million billion mitochondria in an adult human, which together constitute about 10 per cent of our body weight. — Nick Lane

Why do we so dread to think of our species as a species? Can it be that we are afraid of what we may find? That human self-love would suffer too much and that the image of God might prove to be a mask? This could be only partly true, for if we could cease to wear the image of a kindly, bearded, interstellar dictator, we might find ourselves true images of his kingdom, our eves the nebulae, and universes in our cells. — John Steinbeck

Our immune system is evolving through trials of use in fighting illnesses and the bombardment of our modern world toxins and that this evolution not only engages the strengthening of the body and it's T-Cell use but also our emotional intelligence and a higher awareness of our human nature and its original DNA coding as a highly self-reflective and intelligence evolving entity. — Martha Char Love

I do not know who I am anymore. I though I was animal. I am no longer so sure. It's hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit too has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows when the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it. For some people that time never comes. Some stay fractured, forever broken. You see them on the street pushing carts, you see them in the faces of regulars at a bar. My cocoon was that room. — Karen Marie Moning

If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. [ ... ] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now! — Alan W. Watts

When one is undone - sprawled across the cold tile of a public bathroom in a pool of one's own vomit, or shivering in the back of a taxi in a pair of urine-soaked skinny jeans with no money for cab fare and a dead cell phone battery - much like a wobbly toddler or an unhinged politician, one immediately looks for someone else to blame. God. Your parents. Ex-girlfriends. Undocumented immigrants. Marvin in Human Resources. China. — Aisha Tyler

The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organised structure in the universe and to appreciate this you just have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or "neurons" which is the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like a thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses where exchange of information occurs. And based on this information, someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words the numbers of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe. — V.S. Ramachandran

nine of every ten cells in our bodies belong not to us, but to these microbial species (most of them residents of our gut), and that 99 percent of the DNA we're carrying around belongs to those microbes. Some scientists, trained in evolutionary biology, began looking at the human individual in a humbling new light: as a kind of superorganism, a community of several hundred coevolved and interdependent species. — Michael Pollan

You may restrain my body and you may tear my guts out, do anything you wish, but I am still me and you can't take that. You can kill the ego, you can kill the pride, you can kill the want, the desire of a human being. You can lock him in a cell and you can knock his teeth out and smash his brain, but you cannot kill the soul. You never could kill the soul. It's always there, the beginning and the end. You cannot stop it, it's bigger than me. I'm just looking into it and it frightens me sometimes. — Charles Manson

This is the mitochondrial DNA." Bowers nodded back to the cryo-case. "It's the genetic material that actually makes the energy that powers our cells. Think of it like this. Each of our cells has the usual 23 pairs of chromosomes that make us human and determine our physical appearance, how we fight off disease, and other physical characteristics. Now think of the mitochondria as little organisms within our cells. Like cells within a cell. It's those little organisms that make energy for our cells. And they have their own DNA." "I — Jonathan Brookes

One night, Tess finds me sobbing during the health segment of the evening news. Scientists have discovered scarred cells from cardiac arrest fall away over time, and she can't understand how sadly hopeful that is. To me, it means that the human heart has the capacity to heal itself. — Koren Zailckas

Why do you think an egg yolk is full of cholesterol? Because it takes a lot of cholesterol to build a healthy chicken. It also takes a hell of a lot to build and maintain a healthy human being. "In fact, cholesterol is so vital that almost all cells can manufacture cholesterol; one of the key functions of the liver is to synthesize cholesterol. It's vital for the proper functioning of the brain and it's the building block for most sex hormones." -- — David H. Leake

To the extent that genomes can be thought of as compressed encodings of biological structures, they are spectacularly efficient. All the trillions of cells in the human body-not just the tens of billions in the brain-are guided in one way or another by the information contained in 30,000 or so genes. The best high-quality set of pictures of the body- the National Institutes of Health Visible Human Project, a series of high-resolution digital photos of slices taken from volunteer Joseph Paul Jernigan (deceased)-takes up about 60 gigabytes, enough (if left uncompressed) to fill about 100 CD-ROMs-and still not enough detail to capture individual cells. The genome, in contrast, contains only about 3 billion nucleotides, the equivalent (at two bits per nucleotide) of less than two-thirds of a gigabyte, or a single CD-ROM. — Gary F. Marcus

Ours is not a dumb species. We have put a man on the moon. We have unlocked the secrets of the human genome. We have discovered how to take stem cells and coax them into becoming brain cells, heart muscle, liver tissue - any organ of the human body that needs repair. These are our miracles, and there are more. Yet we have not yet found a way to do the simplest things: To live in peace. To stop killing each other when we disagree. To distribute that which is good in life freely and fairly. — Neale Donald Walsch

The brain immediately confronts us with its great complexity. The human brain weighs only three to four pounds but contains about 100 billion neurons. Although that extraordinary number is of the same order of magnitude as the number of stars in the Milky Way, it cannot account for the complexity of the brain. The liver probably contains 100 million cells, but 1,000 livers do not add up to a rich inner life. — Gerald Fischbach

I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows when the harm is too much to bare. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it. For some people, that time never comes. Some stay fractured, forever broken. You see them on the street, pushing carts. You see them in the faces of the regulars at the bar. — Karen Marie Moning

The transpersonal experiences revealing the Earth as an intelligent, conscious entity are corroborated by scientific evidence. Gregory Bateson, who created a brilliant synthesis of cybernetics, information and systems theory, the theory of evolution, anthropology, and psychology came to the conclusion that it was logically inevitable to assume that mental processes occurred at all levels in any system or natural phenomenon of sufficient complexity. He believed that mental processes are present in cells, organs, tissues, organisms, animal and human groups, eco-systems, and even the earth and universe as a whole. — Stanislav Grof

Day wouldn't have understood the concept of immortal cells or HLA markers coming from anyone, accent or not - he'd only gone to school for four years of his life, and he'd never studied science. The only kind of cell he'd heard of was the kind Zakariyya was living in out at Hagerstown. So he did what he'd always done when he didn't understand something a doctor said: he nodded and said yes. — Rebecca Skloot

In recent years, using tissue samples from themselves, their families, and their patients, scientists had grown cells of all kinds - prostate cancer, appendix, foreskin, even bits of human cornea - often with surprising ease. Researchers were using that growing library of cells to make historic discoveries: that cigarettes caused lung cancer; how X-rays and certain chemicals — Rebecca Skloot

We people of the world need to find ways to get to know one another - for then we will recognize that our likenesses are so much greater than our differences, however great our differences may seem. Every cell, every human being, is of equal importance and has work to do in this world — Peace Pilgrim

Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. If the stars in the sky or the atoms of uranium disintegrate in spontaneous explosion, it is not because their substance has lost its balance. It is because matter has attempted to expand beyond the impassable barriers set to every accumulation. Their mass has become too big. If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or a group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutzdity, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because huma beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers. — Leopold Kohr

The reflection, the verisimilitude, of life that shines in the fleshly cells from the soul source is the only cause of man's attachment to his body; obviously he would not pay solicitous homage to a clod of clay. A human being falsely identifies himself with his physical form because the life currents from the soul are breath-conveyed into the flesh with such intense power that man mistakes the effect for a cause, and idolatrously imagines the body to have life of its own. — Paramahansa Yogananda

These days, there are few researchers,if any,who are really thinking about extracellular genetics.Sooner or later, nobody will be able to talk about the essence of human life without some understanding of it. We tend to forget there is also a society among cells on par with the center we consider superior. If any one part of that microcosm becomes dysfunctional, the whole thing's a goner — Hideaki Sena

The American Type Culture Collection - a nonprofit whose funds go mainly toward maintaining and providing pure cultures for science - has been selling HeLa since the sixties. When this book went to press, their price per vial was $256. The ATCC won't reveal how much money it brings in from HeLa sales each year, but since HeLa is one of the most popular cell lines in the world, that number is surely significant. — Rebecca Skloot

To all conservative women out there: If you are so sure the embryo needed for stem cell research are precious human life that can't be destroyed, then implant one in your uterus and bring it to term. That's right, put your cervix where your mouth is. — Bill Maher

Evolution sceptic: Professor Haldane, even given the billions of years that you say were available for evolution, I simply cannot believe it is possible to go from a single cell to a complicated human body, with its trillions of cells organized into bones and muscles and nerves, a heart that pumps without ceasing for decades, miles and miles of blood vessels and kidney tubules, and a brain capable of thinking and talking and feeling. JBS: But madam, you did it yourself. And it only took you nine months. — Richard Dawkins

Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel. — Leonard Bernstein

We actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells ... We are literally a teeming ecosystem of microorganisms. — Jonathan Eisen

A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells ... and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers. — Tony Hoare

The structure of the human brain is enormously complex. It contains about 10 billion nerve cells (neurons), which are interlinked in a vast network through 1,000 billion junctions (synapses). The whole brain can be divided into subsections, or sub-networks, which communicate with each other in a network fashion. All this results in intricate patterns of intertwined webs, networks of nesting within larger networks. — Fritjof Capra

Through their work with fetal tissue, researchers hope to find ways to harness embryonic stem cells which have the ability to become any type of human cell and could provide new treatments for many illnesses. — Tom Allen

Evolution doesn't invent new cells or organs very often. In the same sense, once organ systems have been established by natural selection, they don't go extinct (though some organs lose their function - for instance the human appendix, which was originally larger in our ancestors, as seen in other mammals, and used to digest cellulose at an earlier stage of mammalian evolution). Through the long course of evolution, organs have retained their physiological functions, even if sometimes they get used in new ways. It's not at all uncommon to find ancient organs co-opted, or perhaps "improved upon" by more recent taxa, while at the same time retaining their basic functions under new environmental circumstances. — Greg Graffin

Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs. — Stanislav Grof

The best that can be said about embryonic stem cell research is that it is scientific exploration into the potential benefits of killing human beings. — Tom DeLay

I am a single cell in the body of four billion cells. The body is humankind. I am a single cell. My needs are individual but they are not unique. I am interlocked with other human beings in the consequences of our actions, thoughts, and feelings. I will work for human unity and human peace; for a moral order in harmony with the order of the universe. Together we share the quest for a society of the whole equal to our needs, a society in which we need not live beneath our moral capacity, and in which justice has a life of its own. We are single cells in a body of four billion cells. The body is humankind.
Norman Cousins, Human Options: An Autobiographical Notebook, 1981 — Norman Cousins

Science has discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: 'all meanings depend on the key of interpretation.' What makes us human, and what makes each of us his or her own human, is not simply the genes that we have buried into our base pairs, but how our cells, in dialogue with our environment, feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves. Life is a dialectic. — Jonah Lehrer

About the brain scans taken of yogis while they meditate? The human brain, in advanced states of focus, will physically create a waxlike substance from the pineal gland. This brain secretion is unlike anything else in the body. It has an incredible healing effect, can literally regenerate cells, and may be one of the reasons yogis live so long. This is real science, Robert. This substance has inconceivable properties and can be created only by a mind that is highly tuned to a deeply focused state. — Dan Brown

Life is the division of human cells, a process which begins at conception. — Dick Gephardt

Liquid water has importance as a solvent, a solute, a reactant and a biomolecule, structuring proteins, nucleic acids, cells and controlling our consciousness. In the meanwhile, water makes up over about half of us and the most abundant solid material and fundamental to start formation. There is a hundred times as many water molecules in our bodies as the sum of all the other molecules. Life cannot evolve or continue, or in other words, everything is nothing without water. Thus, we say that water plays a central role in many of the human activities. However, we nearly always overlook deep researches in the structure and properties of water and the special relationship it has with our lives. — Xiao Feng Pang

And suddenly it hits you: Human skin is actually made up of billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called "cells"! And what is even more interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying! This is a fact. Your skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the older veteran cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and obtained offices with nice views,are constantly being shoved out the window head first, without so much as a pension plan,by younger hotshot cells moving up from below. — Dave Barry

It is a level of psychic pain holy incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. — David Foster Wallace

Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal. — Rebecca Skloot

I'd like to end the book a lot of ways. Except I don't have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble. Well, that's not true. But when cancer cells run amok and burst out of the prostate and take over the liver and lymph glands and end up killing everything in the body including themselves, they certainly are acting like some humans we know. — P. J. O'Rourke

Incredibly, the human body produces about 2 million red blood cells every second. — Nessa Carey

If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected). The microbes choke and die after a few hours. — Sam Kean

Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination. Unfortunately, our current culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth. If something can't be quantified and calculated, then it can't be true. Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn't how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness. — Jonah Lehrer

There are a hundred trillion cells in the human body, and every single one of the cells of my body loves you. We shed cells, and grow new ones, and my new cells love you more than the old ones, which is why I love you more every day than I did the day before. It's science. And when I die and they burn my body and I become ashes that mix with the air, and part of the ground and the trees and the stars, everyone who breathes that air or sees the flowers that grow out of the ground or looks up at the stars will remember you and love you, because I love you that much. — Cassandra Clare

You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven't you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you've seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?" She made a tiny spitting sound. "You can always get some more people. they reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format. Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It's the axiomatic truth of our times. — Richard K. Morgan

When the finely tuned balance among the different parts of bodies breaks down, the individual creature can die. A cancerous tumor, for example, is born when one batch of cells no longer cooperates with others. By dividing endlessly, or by failing to die properly, these cells can destroy the necessary balance that makes a living individual person. Cancers break the rules that allow cells to cooperate with one another. Like bullies who break cooperative societies, cancers behave in their own best interest until they kill their larger community, the human body. — Neil Shubin

Three quick breaths triggered the responses: he fell into the floating awareness ... focusing the consciousness ... aortal dilation ... avoiding the unfocused mechanism of consciousness ... to be conscious by choice ... blood enriched and swift-flooding the overload regions ... one does not obtain food-safety freedom by instinct alone ... animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct ... the animal destroys and does not produce ... animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual ... the human requires a background grid through which to see his universe ... focused consciousness by choice, this forms your grid ... bodily integrity follows nerve-blood flow according to the deepest awareness of cell needs ... all things/cells/beings are impermanent ... strive for flow-permanence within ... — Frank Herbert

Shinya Yamanaka's work has involved mice and human cells, and advances the prospect of providing new cells or body parts for patients. — John Gurdon

The skin cells on your nose might well be "potential human beings," in the loose sense in which a rubber ball is a "potential eraser." But a zygote is not a "potential human being" or a "potentially rational animal." Rather, it is an actual human being and thus an actual rational animal, just one that hasn't yet fully realized its inherent potentials. Harris and his ilk might want to ignore the importance of this distinction, but that it is a genuine distinction cannot rationally be denied. — Edward Feser

I find no reason to think that aging is genetically determined. Genes do not provide information for the development of the individual beyond growth and the reproductive process in which the genes are transmitted to the next generation. Once past the reproductive stage, the individual has served the purposes of preservation of the species, and then he is on his own. The wrinkled human face is the victim of gravity and of cumulative errors in the reproduction of cells. Since aging is not programed, but is a badly improvised interference with youthful beauty, we have improvised an operation to counteract its effects. Aging is a form of misinformation. If we get the facts right, you will be able to read it in our faces. ("Motherhood") — William S. Wilson

Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria's point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them. — Bill Bryson

An immune system of enormous complexity is present in all vertebrate animals. When we place a population of lymphocytes from such an animal in appropriate tissue culture fluid, and when we add an antigen, the lymphocytes will produce specific antibody molecules, in the absense of any nerve cells. I find it astonishing that the immune system embodies a degree of complexity which suggests some more or less superficial though striking analogies with human language, and that this cognitive system has evolved and functions without assistance of the brain. — Niels Kaj Jerne

A meticulous virtual copy of the human brain would enable basic research on brain cells and circuits or computer-based drug trials. — Henry Markram

If one stretches out the DNA contained in the nucleus of a human cell, one obtains a two-yard-long thread that is only ten atoms wide. This thread is a billion times longer than its own width. Relatively speaking, it is as if your little finger stretched from Paris to Los Angeles. — Jeremy Narby

In the absence of infection, more than 100 million NK cells are circulating at speed throughout the human body, fully loaded with poisons whose sole function is to kill human cells. This dangerous state of affairs necessitates strict regulation of the activation and implementation of NK-cell cytotoxicity. — Peter Parham

With its hundred billion nerve cells, with their hundred trillion interconnections, the human brain is the most complex phenomenon in the known universe - always, of course, excepting the interaction of some six billion such brains and their owners within the socio-technological culture of our planetary ecosystem! — Steven Rose

The idea that we are "stewards of the earth" is another symptom of human arrogance. Imagine yourself with the task of overseeing your body's physical processes. Do you understand the way it works well enough to keep all its systems in operation? Can you make your kidneys function? Can you control the removal of waste? Are you conscious of the blood flow through your arteries, or the fact that you are losing a hundred thousand skin cells a minute? — Lynn Margulis

A cell has a nucleus and some other parts like membranes, plasmas and other stuff. Its energy is made up of protons, neurons and electrons. Genetic scientists, however, have discovered that the majority of a cell is made up of something unknown. Something akin to space filled with electromagnetic fibers of light. The human body is made up of some 37 trillion cells. What do you think you are made of? Who do you think you are? — Kate McGahan

As to the strangest claim in the novel: that only 10 percent of the cells in our body are human (and the rest are bacteria and parasites). This is true! There is a wonderful book exploring this topic that is as horrific as it is humorous, Human Wildlife by Dr. Robert Buckman. — James Rollins

If the cells and fibres in one human brain were all stretched out end to end, they would certainly reach to the moon and back. Yet the fact that they are not arranged end to end enabled man to go there himself. The astonishing tangle within our heads makes us what we are. — Colin Blakemore

I know human beings are made up of cells, but I'm convinced my father was made up of negativity. — Kim Holden

Unlike the heart or kidney, which have a small, defined set of cell types, we still do not have a taxonomy of neurons, and neuroscientists still argue whether specific types of neurons are unique to humans. But there is no disputing that neurons are only about 10 percent of the cells in the human brain. — Thomas R. Insel

"Ask, and it is given" means that whether you are a full blossoming genius human, or whether you are the one-celled amoeba in the ocean, or a cell in one of your bodies, when it is concluded that something else is preferred (no matter how developed the consciousness is) every time a preference is noted, Nonphysical Energy rushes forth to answer it. It is the promise of our evolving beingness. — Esther Hicks

There is a strong religious commitment to the sanctity of human life, but, paradoxically, some of the most fervent protectors of microscopic stem cells are the most ardent proponents of the death penalty. — Jimmy Carter

Human sign systems are in this sense extensions of the various ways in which molecules read each other, cells read enzymes, organisms read sensations, and all write upon each other. — Christopher Vitale

Well, the human genome has massive redundancy - that means that two per cent of the DNA does all the work of instructing the ribosomes that build the proteins that make up the cells of your body. Ninety-eight per cent of your DNA just sits there doing nothing. Taking up space in the gene. — Ian McDonald

That a universe exists within every human being. That to the blood cells and organs in your body, you are god. That this universe is only one individual among infinite others. — Peter Tieryas

The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is - the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones.
If such a consciousness truly is set loose in the world, nothing will be the same. It will free us to be in a sacred body, on a sacred planet, in sacred communion with all of it. It will infect the universe with holiness. We will discover the Divine deep within the earth and the cells of our bodies, and we will lover her there with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds. — Sue Monk Kidd

The human brain is the last, and greatest, scientific frontier. It is truly an internal cosmos that lies contained within our skulls. The more than 100 billion nerve cells and trillion supporting cells that make up your brain and mine constitute the most elaborate structure in the known universe. — Joel Davis

I strongly oppose cloning, as do most Americans. We recoil at the idea of growing human beings for spare body parts or creating life for our convenience. And while we must devote enormous energy to conquering disease, it is equally important that we pay attention to the moral concerns raised by the new frontier of human embryo stem cell research. Even the most noble ends do not justify any means. — George W. Bush

Humanity shares a common ancestry with all living things on Earth. We often share especially close intimacies with the microbial world. In fact, only a small percentage of the cells in the human body are human at all. Yet, the common biology and biochemistry that unites us also makes us susceptible to contracting and transmitting infectious disease. — Brenda Wilmoth Lerner