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What makes spinal-cord injuries as devastating as they are is that everything about them plays out in absolutes: they are instantaneous, utterly disabling and horribly permanent.

Jeffrey Kluger

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Jeffrey Kluger
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: May 21
Author
Contributing Editor
Journalist
Lawyer
Screenwriter
Writer
Plays
Cord
Permanent
Horribly
Absolutes
Instantaneous
Makes
Cords
Everything
Injuries
Play
Devastating
Utterly
Disabling
Injury
Spinal

More quotes by Jeffrey Kluger

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Athletes often start life at the opposite end of the wealth and prestige spectrum, but as soon as they exhibit an unusual talent for swinging a bat or sinking a free-throw they may find that the rules have been suspended for them. They are waved through school and into the pros, and incidents of bad behavior are overlooked or covered up.
Jeffrey Kluger
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Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.
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Credit or debit cards, for starters, are nothing short of shoppers' Novocain. Even in the age of digital purchases and virtual money, we still attach a special value to dirty paper with pictures of presidents on it. Handing some of that to a cashier simply hurts more than handing over a little sliver of plastic.
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Spare a thought for the poor introverts among us. In a world of party animals and glad-handers, they're the ones who stand by the punch bowl. In a world of mixers and pub crawls, they prefer to stay home with a book. Everywhere around them, cell phones ring and e-mails chime and they just want a little quiet.
Jeffrey Kluger
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The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human.
Jeffrey Kluger
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My own life has in some ways been a decades-long tour of the sibling experience. I have full sibs, I have half-sibs, and for a time I had step-sibs.
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Never mind what you've heard. Halle Berry was not the first black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was actually the 74th white one. And never mind all this talk about America electing its first black President Barack Obama is actually the 44th white man to hold the job.
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Identical twins are ideal lab specimens for studying the difference between learned and inherited traits since they come from the womb preloaded with matching genetic operating systems. Any meaningful differences in their behaviors or personalities are thus likely to have been acquired, not innate.
Jeffrey Kluger
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A mere ape in our world may be a scholar in its own, and the low life of any beast may be a source of deep satisfaction for the beast itself.
Jeffrey Kluger
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Ambition is an expensive impulse, one that requires an enormous investment of emotional capital. Like any investment, it can pay off in countless different kinds of coin.
Jeffrey Kluger
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Operating-room errors hold a special terror for patients, if only because they seem like the most avoidable kind of complications. The occasional horror stories of patients who have the wrong leg removed or the wrong knee replaced generate the most headlines, as do tales of patients whose identities are mixed up entirely.
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Science has yet to isolate the Godiva Chocolate or Prada gene, but that doesn't mean your weakness for pricey swag isn't woven into your DNA. According to a new study of identical twins, it's less TV ads or Labor Day sales that make you buy the things you do than the tastes and temperaments that are already part of you at birth.
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Kids are anarchy writ large.
Jeffrey Kluger
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A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can't therefore argue that the net doesn't exist. Just ask the fish.
Jeffrey Kluger
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More and more NFL players have been willing their bodies to science so that their brains can be studied even if they die of other causes.
Jeffrey Kluger
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There are a lot of downsides to being male. We age faster and die younger. But give us this: we're lifetime baby-making machines. Women's reproductive abilities start to wane when they're as young as 35. Men? We're good to go pretty much till we're dead.
Jeffrey Kluger
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There's no such thing as downtime for your brain.
Jeffrey Kluger
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The best thing about science is that hard, empirical answers are always there if you look hard enough. The best thing about religion is that the very absence of that certainty is what requires - and gives rise to - deep feelings of faith.
Jeffrey Kluger
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The families of many athletes - incensed at the sports leagues and hoping to make games safer overall - are increasingly making the brains of players who die prematurely and suspiciously available for study. Some athletes are even making the bequest themselves.
Jeffrey Kluger
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It's one of the worst-kept secrets of family life that all parents have a preferred son or daughter, and the rules for acknowledging it are the same everywhere: The favored kids recognize their status and keep quiet about it - the better to preserve the good thing they've got going and to keep their siblings off their back.
Jeffrey Kluger