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We living things are a late outgrowth of the metabolism of our galaxy. The carbon that enters into our composition was cooked in a remote past in a dying star. The waters of ancient seas set the pattern of ions in our blood. The ancient atmospheres moulded our metabolism.

George Wald

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George Wald
Age: 90 †
Born: 1906
Born: November 18
Died: 1997
Died: April 12
Biochemist
Biologist
Chemist
Neuroscientist
Physician
Physiologist
Scientist
New York City
New York
Blood
Carbon
Cooked
Stars
Atmosphere
Seas
Water
Patterns
Enters
Living
Star
Remote
Atmospheres
Past
Ancient
Galaxy
Moulded
Things
Sea
Waters
Outgrowth
Dying
Composition
Ions
Late
Pattern
Metabolism

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We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.
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Since we have had a history, men have pursued an ideal of immortality.
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A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.
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A scientist should be the happiest of men. Not that science isn't serious but as everyone knows, being serious is one way of being happy, just as being gay is one way of being unhappy.
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Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.
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A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better. To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.
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The Vietnamese have a secret weapon. It's their willingness to die beyond our willingness to kill. In effect, they've been saying, You can kill us, but you'll have to kill a lot of us you may have to kill all of us. And, thank heaven, we are not yet ready to do that.
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A scientist is in a sense a learned small boy. There is something of the scientist in every small boy. Others must outgrow it. Scientists can stay that way all their lives.
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There's life all over this universe, but the only life in the solar system is on earth, and in the whole universe we are the only men.
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Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.
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Evolution advances, not by a priori design, but by the selection of what works best out of whatever choices offer. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.
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The thought that we're in competition with Russians or with Chinese is all a mistake, and trivial. We are one species, with a world to win.
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Not all living creatures die. An amoeba, for example, need never die it need not even, like certain generals, fade away. It just divides and becomes two new amoebas.
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I can conceive of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a so-called superior (or, if you wish, advanced) technology in outer space.
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We have to get rid of those nuclear weapons.
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One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are-as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.
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About two million years ago, man appeared. He has become the dominant species on the earth. All other living things, animal and plant, live by his sufferance. He is the custodian of life on earth, and in the solar system. It's a big responsibility.
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The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life.
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Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing.
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So-called defense now absorbs sixty per cent of the national budget, and about twelve per cent of the Gross National Product.
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