Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Most humbly, my beloved Saviour, I bow myself before thee. I am a worm and no man. I alone deserve to suffer. I alone shrink from suffering. I was with thee in thy days of joy, singing 'Hosanna,' and I wished to make thee King. Now, in thine hour of suffering, I am far from thee.
There are lots of different strategies that an animal can use to survive. What a worm does is try to convert food into worms as soon as possible. In three days a single worm produces 300 progeny. So why put your resources into developing if you can make a brand-new worm in no time at all?
The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there's only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.
I thought I'd love to be a gardener because I grew up with a vegetable garden and I love being close to the Earth and growing things. At my home in L.A., I have a great garden and I grow all kinds of things. I even have a worm farm! The worms help create organic compost out of kitchen scraps.
For a decade, I had been studying a transparent worm, the C. elegans. I immediately thought, if you could put the G.F.P. gene into C. elegans, you'd then be able to see biological processes in live animals. Until then, we had to kill them and prepare their tissues chemically to visualize proteins or active genes within cells.
It wasn't until I got out of the Army and I heard Coltrane's record 'Coltrane,' when he was doing 'Inch Worm' and 'Out of This World,' that I thought, 'Oh my God, you can do that?' And then I thought, 'OK, I better go back and listen to Eric Dolphy a bit.' And then I said, 'Hmm, I better pull out these Ornette Coleman records.'
An intimate core of my being recognizes that there is nothing in me that can go on: there is no spark; there is no infestation of vaporous miasma that has the capacity to continue, and there is nothing in me that wishes to continue. This moment is, for me, all that there is, and I'm willing to accept it. I'm a worm; I have no soul.
