Kean Quotes & Sayings

I'm kind of a sucker for the retro-diagnoses. — Sam Kean

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality. — Sam Kean

For his part, Mendeleev scanned Lecoq de Boisbaudran's data on gallium and told the experimentalist, with no justification, that he must have measured something wrong, because the density and weight of gallium differed from Mendeleev's predictions. This betrays a flabbergasting amount of gall, but as science philosopher-historian Eric Scerri put it, Mendeleev always "was willing to bend nature to fit his grand philosophical scheme." The only difference between Mendeleev and crackpottery is that Mendeleev was right: Lecoq de Boisbaudran soon retracted his data and published results that corroborated Mendeleev's predictions. — Sam Kean

Sir Isaac Newton famously said that he had achieved everything by standing on the shoulders of giants - the scientific men whose findings he built upon. The same might be said about silicon. After germanium did all the work, silicon became an icon, and germanium was banished to periodic table obscurity. — Sam Kean

Kindness is goodness hidden in the heart
More often than declared in speech. — William Kean Seymour

Most people who have encountered mercury have done so after breaking a mercury thermometer. And many of us who saw the liquid balls of mercury scatter across a floor or countertop considered the element the most beautiful on the periodic table. — Sam Kean

Atoms of Element 118 fill an outer shell with electrons, creating a special type of element called a noble gas. Noble gases are natural turning points on the table, ending one row and pointing to the next. — Sam Kean

Art, in other words, betrays a sexy mental fitness. — Sam Kean

Mutations can arise anywhere in the genome, in gene DNA and noncoding DNA alike. But mutations to genes have bigger consequences: They can disable proteins and kill a creature. — Sam Kean

Think of the most fussy science teacher you ever had. The one who docked your grade if the sixth decimal place in your answer was rounded incorrectly; who tucked in his periodic table T-shirt, corrected every student who said "weight" when he or she meant "mass", and made everyone, including himself, wear goggles even while mixing sugar water. Now try to imagine someone whom your teacher would hate for being anal-retentive. That is the kind of person who works for a bureau of standards and measurement. — Sam Kean

I was reading this story about these people who suffered from brain injuries, and then their behavior changed kind of drastically afterward, and I just said to myself, 'There's no way that that can possibly be true.' — Sam Kean

The amygdala is indeed crucial for monitoring our environment and deciding what's worth getting worked up over. Once the amygdala determines this, however, it merely trips another circuit to actually produce the panic. — Sam Kean

A fully plastic brain learns everything and remembers nothing. — Sam Kean

Confederate surgeons usually performed "circular" amputations. They made a 360-degree cut through the skin, then scrunched it up like a shirt cuff. After sawing through the muscle and bone, they inched the skin back down to wrap the stump. This method led to less scarring and infection. Union surgeons preferred "flap" amputations: doctors left two flaps of flesh hanging beside the wound to fold over after they'd sawed through. This method was quicker and provided a more comfortable stump for prosthetics. Altogether, surgeons lopped off 60,000 fingers, toes, hands, feet, and limbs during the war. — Sam Kean

A woman should always be late for a man. Men should wait. But a woman should never be late for another woman. A woman's time is precious: she has a lot of things to do.. — Louise Kean

Medieval alchemists, despite their lust for gold, considered mercury the most potent and poetic substance in the universe. As a child, I would have agreed with them. — Sam Kean

What I find fascinating is the idea that we all have a physical brain, but we also have this mental part, and we have to figure out how they work together. — Sam Kean

Before the Human Genome Project, most scientists assumed, based on our complex brains and behaviors, that humans must have around 100,000 genes; some estimates went as high as 150,000. — Sam Kean

There are a few elements - especially platinum and palladium - that have the amazing ability to absorb up to 900 times their own volume in hydrogen gas. To get a sense of the scale there, that's roughly equivalent to a 250-pound man swallowing something the size of a dozen African bull elephants and not gaining an inch on his waistline. — Sam Kean

I always knew that I would give back. My mother and my father both believe you have to work hard and give back. That's why I was a volunteer firefighter, that's why I worked in a homeless shelter. I always knew I'd give back, elective office or not. — Thomas Kean Jr.

Alessandro Volta, an Italian count and the inspiration for the eponym "volt," demonstrated this back around 1800 with a clever experiment. Volta had a number of volunteers form a chain and each pinch the tongue of one neighbor. The two end people then put their fingers on battery leads. Instantly, up and down the line, people tasted each other's fingers as sour. — Sam Kean

If studying the periodic table taught me nothing else, it's that the credulity of human beings for periodic table panaceas is pretty much boundless. — Sam Kean

I eat you, life; you make me living eat. — William Kean Seymour

For more details about the Curies especially, see Sheilla Jones's wonderful book The Quantum Ten, an account of the surprisingly contentious and fractious early days of quantum mechanics, circa 1925. — Sam Kean

We know that genes shape human cultures and human societies: The DNA we inherited from our ancestors makes certain foods taste better, affects the way we care for children, influences what colors we find vibrant, and contributes to our love of socializing, among other examples. — Sam Kean

The amygdala plays a crucial role in processing fear, and minus her two amygdalae, S.M. became unflappable. Studies of her are actually a hoot to read, since they basically consist of scientists concocting ever-more-elaborate ways of trying to scare her. — Sam Kean

The amygdala is one of those brain structures that a lot of people know a little bit about, and there's a definite tendency to conflate the amygdala and the fear response itself - as if the amygdala, and the amygdala alone, 'causes' fear. — Sam Kean

The irony is too rich not to point out. When arranging the different human races in tiers, from just below the angels to just above the brutes, smug racialist scientists of the 1800s always equated black skin with 'subhuman' beasts like Neanderthals. But facts is facts: pure Nordic Europeans carry far more Neanderthal DNA than any modern African. — Sam Kean

No element gets people telling crazy stories like mercury does. People have told me tales about pharmacists waxing floors with mercury, mothers rubbing it into babies' skin to kill germs, and 10-year-olds coating dimes in it to make them shine, then blithely carrying them around in their pockets. — Sam Kean

Those of us raised in modern cities tend to notice horizontal and vertical lines more quickly than lines at other orientations. In contrast, people raised in nomadic tribes do a better job noticing lines skewed at intermediate angles, since Mother Nature tends to work with a wider array of lines than most architects. — Sam Kean

Things look especially bleak for common killers such as diabetes and heart disease. Those ailments clearly have a genetic component. But when scientists survey genes looking for which mutations patients have in common, they come up empty. — Sam Kean

While our amplified knowledge of genetics - and the increasing precision of the field - does make it tempting to take on celebrity cases, retro-genetics can't always provide clear answers. — Sam Kean

Most stars just fuse hydrogen into helium, but larger stars can fuse helium into other elements. Still larger stars, in turn, fuse those elements into slightly bigger ones, and so on. — Sam Kean

Today alpha equals 1/137.0359 or so. Regardless, its value makes the periodic table possible. It allows atoms to exist and also allows them to react with sufficient vigor to form compounds, since electrons neither roam too freely from their nuclei nor cling too closely. This just-right balance has led many scientists to conclude that the universe couldn't have hit upon its fine structure constant by accident. — Sam Kean

Without a functioning hippocampus, names, dates, and other information falls straight through the mind like a sieve. — Sam Kean

A few years later, Mendeleev, now famous, divorced his wife and wanted to remarry. Although the conservative local church said he had to wait seven years, he bribed a priest and got on with the nuptials. This technically made him a bigamist, but no one dared arrest him. When a local bureaucrat complained to the tsar about the double standard applied to the case- the priest was defrocked-the tsar primly replied, I admit, Mendeleev has two wives, but I have only one Mendeleev. — Sam Kean

In a vague way, I always knew neurosurgery was different - more delicate, more difficult, more demanding. After all, we say things like, 'I'm no brain surgeon,' for a reason. — Sam Kean

Also unlike a planet, an electron - if excited by heat or light - can leap from its low-energy shell to an empty, high-energy shell. The electron cannot stay in the high-energy state for long, so it soon crashes back down. But this isn't a simple back-and-forth motion, because as it crashes, the electron jettisons energy by emitting light. — Sam Kean

Hat manufacturers once used a bright orange mercury wash to separate fur from pelts, and the common hatters who dredged around in the steamy vats, like the mad one in Alice in Wonderland, gradually lost their hair and wits. — Sam Kean

Brains, you see, vary a lot from person to person - they vary as much as faces do. — Sam Kean

Dr. Rush made patients ingest the solution until they drooled, and often people's teeth and hair fell out after weeks or months of continuous treatment. His "cure" no doubt poisoned or outright killed swaths of people whom yellow fever might have spared. Even so, having perfected his treatment in Philadelphia, ten years later he sent Meriwether and William off with some prepackaged samples. As a handy side effect, Dr. Rush's pills have enabled modern archaeologists to track down campsites used by the explorers. With the weird food and questionable water they encountered in the wild, someone in their party was always queasy, and to this day, mercury deposits dot the soil many places where the gang dug a latrine, perhaps after one of Dr. Rush's "Thunderclappers" had worked a little too well. — Sam Kean

All the elements other than hydrogen and helium make up just 0.04 percent of the universe. Seen from this perspective, the periodic system appears to be rather insignificant. But the fact remains that we live on the earth ... where the relative abundance of elements is quite different. — Sam Kean

Biologists summarize these hypothalamic duties as the "four F's" of animal behavior - feeding, fleeing, fighting, and, well, sexual congress. — Sam Kean

When first presented with the jumble of the periodic table, I scanned for mercury and couldn't find it. It is there - between gold, which is also dense and soft, and thallium, which is also poisonous. But the symbol for mercury, Hg, consists of two letters that don't even appear in its name. — Sam Kean

Animal vision - including human vision - is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all. — Sam Kean

Rope-a-dope boxers and quarterbacks and hockey enforcers continue to shake off concussions on the theory of no blood, no harm. But each concussion effectively softens up the brain and ups the chances of more concussions. After multiple blows, neurons start to die and spongy holes open up; people's personalities then disintegrate, leaving them depressed, diminished, suicidal. Four centuries have passed, but macho modern athletes* might as well trade pads for armor and go joust with — Sam Kean

Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the body's circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal people, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. They're on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run. — Sam Kean

Since before even the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, human beings used the stars and seasons to track time and record their most important moments. Cesium severed that link with the heavens, effaced it just as surely as urban streetlamps blot out constellations. — Sam Kean

It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier, have wasted their oil. The famed theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready, dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows them not. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

(Rutherford himself was fond of saying, "In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting" - words — Sam Kean

The inability to trace DNA to actual diseases has serious consequences. As does the opposite problem - not being able to trace diseases back to DNA. — Sam Kean

Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry — Sam Kean

No one knows quite the reason, but surgically severing the corpus callosum can reduce the rate and intensity of seizures. So in the early 1960s, a few patients with severe epilepsy had their corpus callosums cut, turning them into split-brain people. — Sam Kean

In some sense, what you might have suspected from the first day of high-school chemistry is true: The periodic table is a colossal waste of time. Nine out of every 10 atoms in the universe are hydrogen, the first element and the major constituent of stars. The other 10 percent of all atoms are helium. — Sam Kean

A long iron rod rocketed straight through the very forefront of Phineas Gage's brain. It's kind of an unusual part of the brain: you can suffer pretty severe injuries to it and often walk away from the injury. It's not a part of the brain that's necessarily vital for your biological self. But it is very important for personality. — Sam Kean

Jupiter instead cooled down below the threshold for fusion, but it maintained enough heat and mass and pressure to cram atoms very close together, to the point they stop behaving like the atoms we recognize on earth. Inside Jupiter, they enter a limbo of possibility between chemical and nuclear reactions, where planet-sized diamonds and oily hydrogen metal seem plausible. — Sam Kean

Thirteen aluminum atoms grouped together in the right way do a killer bromine, the two entities indistinguishable in chemical reactions. — Sam Kean

If stem cells divide equally, so both daughter cells look more or less the same, each one becomes another stem cell. If the split is unequal, neurons form prematurely. — Sam Kean

Most people, even most doctors, learn that the placenta is a nice, tight seal that prevents anything in the mother's body from invading the fetus, and vice-versa. That's mostly true. But the placenta doesn't seal off the baby perfectly, and every so often, something slips across. — Sam Kean

To be sure, ASPM isn't the gene responsible for building big brains - there's no such single gene. But it's critical to the process, and the primate line has almost certainly benefited from distinct changes in ASPM. — Sam Kean

For a long time, I kept an eye out for element eighty at school and in books, as you might watch for a childhood friend's name — Sam Kean

Kindness is in a prison till it finds
Release in words or deeds. — William Kean Seymour

Unlike uranium, plutonium was created in an American lab in 1940, but scientists soon realized that it could produce even wilder chain reactions and even bigger explosions. In fact, fearing another country would create it, too, the American government went to great lengths to keep even the existence of plutonium a secret. — Sam Kean

read the brilliant compilation of testimonies in Leslie Kean's book: "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record." The — John DeSouza

Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn't dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed down laxatives from father to son. Perhaps for this reason, antimony found heavy work as a medicine, although it's actually toxic. Mozart probably died from taking too much to combat a severe fever. — Sam Kean

B2FH traces these various fusion reactions and explains the recipe for producing everything up to iron: it's nothing less than evolution for elements. — Sam Kean

We really should be grateful to the people who participate in research and allow certain details to be published about themselves. Because if they didn't, we wouldn't have nearly the understanding of the brain that we do. — Sam Kean

So if big enough droplets fell far enough fast enough, someone floating right near the metallic hydrogen layer inside Jupiter maybe, just maybe, could have looked up into its cream and orange sky and seen the most spectacular show ever
fireworks lighting up the Jovian night with a trillion streaks of brilliant crimson, what scientists call neon rain. — Sam Kean

Campaign finance and ethics reform only works if it curtails all special interest groups equally and does not carve out any exceptions to benefit one party or another. 'Pay to play' reform was passed to limit the influence of big spending contractors over the public officials from whom they are trying to obtain work. — Thomas Kean Jr.

Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn't a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that "God does not play dice with the universe." He was wrong, and it's too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: "Einstein! Stop telling God what to do. — Sam Kean

In a touch Buckland would have appreciated, this multipronged dispersal from Africa is sometimes called the Weak Garden of Eden theory. But this tale is actually better than the biblical version; we didn't lose Eden but learned to make other Edens across the world. — Sam Kean

Carbon's eastern neighbor on the table, nitrogen, dresses up diamonds in pinks, yellows, oranges, and brownish tints known romantically as 'champagne.' — Sam Kean

Scientists didn't discover the noble gas helium - the second most common element in the universe - on Earth until 1895. And they thought it existed in minute quantities only, until miners found a huge underground cache in Kansas in 1903. — Sam Kean

I want to emphasis again, Governor (Thomas) Kean and Congressman (Lee) Hamilton pointed out that congressional oversight also was a major contributor to our failures prior to 9/11 and that has to be fixed as well. — John McCain

But for years questions persisted about whether most cannibalism was religiously motivated and selective or culinary and routine. DNA suggests routine. Every known ethnic group worldwide has one of two genetic signatures that help our bodies fight off certain diseases that cannibals catch, especially mad-cow-like diseases that come from eating each other's brains. This defensive DNA almost certainly wouldn't have become fixed worldwide if it hadn't once been all too necessary. — Sam Kean

The more that I looked at DNA, the more I realized it was nature and nurture. It's how genes and your environment work together to produce the person you are. — Sam Kean

One popular trick, since gallium molds easily and looks like aluminum, is to fashion gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch as your guests recoil when their Earl Grey "eats" their utensils. — Sam Kean

Aluminium's sixty-year reign as the world's most precious substance was glorious, but soon an American chemist ruined everything. — Sam Kean

When it comes to the periodic table, the United States really blew its chance to make a name for itself. If you look over a map of all the elements named for cities, states, countries, and continents, it's not surprising that European locales dominate the map. — Sam Kean

One theme I ran into over and over while writing about the periodic table was the future of energy and the question of which element or elements will replace carbon as king. — Sam Kean

Many different elements can form isomers, but only a few elements on the periodic table, like hafnium, can form isomers that last more than fractions of a second - and might therefore be turned into weapons. — Sam Kean

If you had to sum up chemistry in one sentence, it might be this: Atoms need to have full shells of electrons to feel satisfied, and different elements steal, shed, or borrow different numbers of electrons to achieve a full shell. — Sam Kean

A famous actor, Edmund Kean, on his deathbed, was reported to have said, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." — Melvin Helitzer

When you do the math and examine how much energy is produced per atomic union, you find that fusing anything to iron's twenty-six protons costs energy. That means post-ferric fusion* does an energy-hungry star no good. Iron is the final peal of a star's natural life. — Sam Kean

In a cool solitude of trees Where leaves and birds a music spin, Mind that was weary is at ease, New rhythms in the soul begin. — William Kean Seymour

Ancestor. In fact, this clock tells us that all seven billion people alive today can trace their maternal lineage to one woman who lived in Africa 170,000 years ago, dubbed Mitochondrial Eve. — Sam Kean

Our evolution could have gone in different directions a lot of times. We could have gone extinct at some points. We might not have gotten our big brains, or Neanderthals might have made it while we did not. — Sam Kean

Scientists have continued to tinker with different elements and have learned new ways to store and deliver energy. — Sam Kean

Most mutations involve typos: Something bumps a cell's elbow as it's copying DNA, and the wrong letter appears in a triplet - CAG becomes CCG. — Sam Kean

Furthermore, because silicon packs on more protons than carbon, it's bulkier, like carbon with fifty extra pounds. Sometimes that's not a big deal. Silicon might substitute adequately for carbon in the Martian equivalent of fats or proteins. But carbon also contorts itself into ringed molecules we call sugars. Rings are states of high-tension- which means they store lots of energy-and silicon just isn't supple enough to bend into the right position to form rings. In a related problem, silicon atoms cannot squeeze their electrons into tight spaces for double bonds, which appear in virtually every complicated biochemical. — Sam Kean

In 'The Violinist's Thumb,' I talk about the poignancy of cells leaking across the placenta into both the mother and the child. — Sam Kean

The emerging and vital truth isn't who is more Neanderthal than whom. It's that all peoples, everywhere, enjoyed archaic human lovers whenever they could. These DNA memories are buried deeper inside us than even our ids, and they remind us that the grand saga of how humans spread across the globe will need some personal, private, all-too-human amendments and annotations - rendezvous here, elopements there, and the commingling of genes most everywhere. — Sam Kean

As a child in the early 1980s, I tended to talk with things in my mouth - food, dentist's tubes, balloons that would fly away, whatever - and if no one else was around, I'd talk anyway. — Sam Kean

Except for certain moments - when cells are dividing, for instance - chromosomes don't form compact, countable bodies inside cells. Instead, they unravel and flop about, which makes counting chromosomes a bit like counting strands of ramen in a bowl. — Sam Kean

Most organisms have loads of junk DNA - less pejoratively, noncoding DNA - cluttering their cells. — Sam Kean

If anything runs deeper than a mathematician's love of variables, it's a scientist's love of constants. — Sam Kean

People fluent in two languages can lose either one after trauma, since first and second languages* draw on distinct neural circuits. Language deficits can even interfere with math. We seem to have a natural "number circuit" in the parietal lobe that handles comparisons and magnitudes - the basis of most arithmetic. But we learn some things (like the times tables) linguistically, by rote memorization. So if language goes kaput, so too will those linguistically based skills. More strikingly, some people who struggle to string even three words together can sing just fine. — Sam Kean

The brain, which is plastic when young, must be exposed to certain sights early in life, or it will remain blind to those sights forever. — Sam Kean

Cancer is really a DNA disease ... We have these certain genes that prevent our cells from growing out of control at the expense of the body. And it's a pretty good, robust system. But if a couple of these genes fail, then that's when cancer starts, and cells start growing out of control. — Sam Kean

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