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Kindle Notes & Highlights
that work and play can bleed into each other, become one and the same, until the very idea of their distinction feels meaningless.
It was a lesson my father picked up early: Things can shift suddenly. It’s important to stay nimble.
By focusing on the things we can control, instead of the things we can’t.
Not everyone is rooting for me.
how much the events of our own life were influenced by forces just out of sight.
One needs high-quality and affordable childcare, as I had in Hungary.
Experiments never err, only your expectations do.
Near the very end of The Stress of Life, the book that had so moved me as a high school student, Selye thinks carefully about two mutually exclusive responses to stress in human relations: revenge and gratitude. Revenge, he notes, is an attempt to relieve stress. It is a very human response to a threat to one’s security. But revenge, he observes, “has no virtue whatever, and can only hurt both the giver and the receiver of its fruits.” Revenge brings only more revenge, in an endless cycle. If the goal is to relieve stress in a way that enhances one’s life, rather than detracts from it, there
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Nucleoside modifications in mRNA are the key to evading an immune response.
Scientific inquiry is, as I have explained, a puzzle that never stops changing. Each new piece snapped into place changes the puzzle itself, opening entire new realms into which the puzzle grows. It will continue like that, I suspect, until the puzzle encompasses the universe itself.
Who else was out there and didn’t have such luck? Who could use a little luck right now? What are we missing?
At lunch, we all reflect together on how much work still needs to be done to create equity in the sciences.
But how do we find the people who are out there right now, today, doing important work that is going unseen?
We can do better. I believe we can improve how science is done at academic research institutions. For one thing, we might create a clearer distinction between markers of prestige—titles, publication records, number of citations, grant funding, committee appointments, etiquette, dollars per net square footage—and those of quality science. Too often, we conflate the two, as if they’re one and the same. But a person isn’t a better scientist because she publishes more, or
Most institutions define a scientist’s value, first and foremost, by their funding.
Finally, we can also be more up-front about the influence of money on academic researchers and its implications. Money mattered in the university setting, just as it mattered in industry. But in my experience, academia, uniquely, had the luxury of ignoring a good idea.
There is so much more to discover.
you must trust what’s inside you.
You are the potential. You are the seed.
