The Andromeda Strain Quotes
"As in most crises, the events surrounding the Andromeda Strain were a compound of foresight and foolishness, innocence and ignorance."
"This country supports the largest scientific establishment in the history of mankind."
"New discoveries are constantly being made, and many of these discoveries have important political or social overtones."
"It is useful for the public to be made aware of the way in which scientific crises arise, and are dealt with."
"Nearly everyone involved had moments of great brilliance, and moments of unaccountable stupidity."
"I have avoided the temptation to simplify both the issues and the answers."
"The Indians called it the Country of Lost Borders."
"A crisis is made by men, who enter into the crisis with their own prejudices, propensities, and predispositions."
"A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored."
"Yet underlying the uniqueness of each crisis is a disturbing sameness."
"A characteristic of all crises is their predictability, in retrospect."
"There were no scientific crises in 1885, and indeed none for nearly forty years afterward."
"The first human interaction with extraterrestrial life will consist of contact with organisms similar to, if not identical to, earth bacteria or viruses."
"The consequences of such contact are disturbing."
"Recent theoretical considerations suggest that sterilization procedures of returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee sterile reentry to this planet's atmosphere."
"All available evidence on the origin of life points to an evolutionary progression from simple to complex life forms."
"This situation changed with the postwar period ushered in a new era of biologic research, spurred by the discovery of antibiotics."
"Suddenly there was both enthusiasm and money for biology, and a torrent of discoveries poured forth."
"We therefore urge the establishment of a facility designed to deal with an extraterrestrial life form, should one inadvertently be introduced to the earth."
"So far as we know, no form of life can survive the two million degrees of heat which accompany an atomic nuclear detonation."
"Perhaps the most significant thing about Stone was that he had done Nobel-caliber work as a law student."
"Jeremy knows everything, and is fascinated by the rest."
"The United States had three and a half times as many scientists as the Soviet Union and spent three and a half times as much money on research."
"The total government expenditure in CBW exceeded half a billion dollars a year."
"The true aims of Scoop were to find new life forms that might benefit the Fort Detrick program."
"In essence, it was a study to discover new biological weapons of war."
"If anything happened to Burton and Stone on the ground, the pilot was ordered to fly directly to the Wildfire installation and hover thirty feet above ground until such time as the Wildfire group had determined the correct way to incinerate him, and his airplane, in midair."
"All this combined to assure Stone's repeated appearance before confused Senate subcommittees—and gave him the power of any trusted adviser."
"Have you ever used a glove box?" Burton asked.
"We have whole rooms that are nothing more than glorified glove boxes."
"Everything made of rubber in the cockpit is dissolving."
"I'm informing you now of an RTM crash forty-two minutes ago in Big Head, Utah."
"The green flecks they had seen were much larger than that; clearly, infection could be spread by a mere fraction of the green fleck."
"All decisions involving uncertainty fall within two distinct categories—those with contingencies, and those without."
"Every schoolboy knew that dinosaurs had outgrown themselves, had become too large and ponderous to be viable."
"You may carry the same single cell of Strep. viridians on your body for sixty or seventy years."
"In the end, your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work."
"The best adapted bacteria are the ones that cause minor diseases, or none at all."
"A bacteria that killed its host was also poorly adapted. Because any parasite that kills its host is a failure."
"The theory behind primate experimentation was that these animals were closer biologically to man."
"Computers operated very swiftly—in fractions of a second while people operated slowly, in seconds or minutes."
"It was military doubletalk for crash of unknown cause; it did not distinguish between mechanical failure and pilot failure."
"Most decisions, and nearly all human interaction, can be incorporated into a contingencies model."
"The successful parasites were those that could live off the host without killing him."
"Evolution was directed toward increased reproductive potential."
"The most successful hosts were those that could tolerate the parasite, or even turn it to advantage, to make it work for the host."
"Every breath he breathed, was drenched in bacteria. Bacteria were ubiquitous."
"The only way you might possibly break your suit is to cut it with a scalpel, and the gloves are triple-thickness to prevent just such an occurrence."