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If all insects disappeared, all life on earth would perish. If all humans disappeared, all life on earth would flourish.

Jonas Salk

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Jonas Salk
Age: 80 †
Born: 1914
Born: October 28
Died: 1995
Died: June 23
Biologist
Epidemiologist
Immunologist
Inventor
Medical Researcher
Physician
Virologist
New York City
New York
Jonas Edward Salk
Earth
Humans
Would
Life
Disappeared
Flourish
Perish
Insects

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Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.
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It is courage based on confidence, not daring, and it is confidence based on experience.
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Are we being good ancestors?
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What is ... important is that we - number one: Learn to live with each other. Number two: try to bring out the best in each other.
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My ambition was to bring to bear on medicine a chemical approach. I did that by chemical manipulation of viruses and chemical ways of thinking in biomedical research.
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It is said to await certainty is to await eternity.
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When I worked on the polio vaccine, I had a theory. I guided each [experiment] by imagining myself in the phenomenon in which I was interested. The intuitive realm . . . the realm of the imagination guides my thinking.
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I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.
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[Who owns the patent on this vaccine?] Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?
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There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.
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I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.
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I see the triumph of good over evil as a manifestation of the error-correcting process of evolution.
Jonas Salk
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As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that. That's what motivates me.
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This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it.
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The mind, in addition to medicine, has powers to turn the immune system around.
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Solutions come through evolution. They come through asking the right questions, because the answers pre-exist. It is the questions that we must define and discover. You don't invent the answer-you reveal the answer.
Jonas Salk
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I speak about universal evolution and teleological evolution, because I think the process of evolution reflects the wisdom of nature. I see the need for wisdom to become operative. We need to try to put all of these things together in what I call an evolutionary philosophy of our time.
Jonas Salk
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It is possible to create an epidemic of health which is self-organizing and self-propelling.
Jonas Salk
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What you see in living systems, and in genetic systems, is that the genes are already there, having arisen in the course of time, and when they are needed they become activated. If they had to be invented, the time would be too late.
Jonas Salk
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If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of evolution, consciously as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age could be born.
Jonas Salk