Evan Wondrasek

“Is the brain a gift from God, or simply the jackpot of a trillion rolls of DNA dice?”
― Frank T. Vertosick Jr., When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery

“Hospitals, like every other industry, have gotten more efficient by cutting costs, which means virtually no excess capacity—on a per capita basis the United States has far fewer hospital beds than a few decades ago. Indeed, during a routine influenza season, usage of respirators rises to nearly 100 percent; in a pandemic, most people who needed a mechanical respirator probably would not get one.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

“Closing borders would be of no benefit either. It would be impossible to shut down trade, prevent citizens from returning to the country, etc. That would shut down the entire economy and enormously magnify supply chain problems by ending imports—including all health-related imports like drugs, syringes, gowns, everything. Even at that, models show that a 90 percent effective border closing would delay the disease by only a few days, at most a week, and a 99 percent effective shutting of borders would delay it at most a month.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

“Suppose there’s a rooster standing next to you, and there’s a chicken across the street. The rooster gives a sexually solicitive gesture that is hot by chicken standards, and she promptly runs over to mate with him (I haven’t a clue if this is how it works, but let’s just suppose). And thus we have a key behavioral biological question—why did the chicken cross the road? And if you’re a psychoneuroendocrinologist, your answer would be “Because circulating estrogen levels in that chicken worked in a certain part of her brain to make her responsive to this male signaling,” and if you’re a bioengineer, the answer would be “Because the long bone in the leg of the chicken forms a fulcrum for her pelvis (or some such thing), allowing her to move forward rapidly,” and if you’re an evolutionary biologist, you’d say, “Because over the course of millions of years, chickens that responded to such gestures at a time that they were fertile left more copies of their genes, and thus this is now an innate behavior in chickens,” and so on, thinking in categories, in differing scientific disciplines of explanation.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst