Michael Specter Quotes
I started to write about science and medicine at the Washington Post, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
Quotes to Explore
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Medicine is the means by which we poor feeble creatures try to keep from dying or aching.
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This is alchemy, and this is the office of Vulcan; he is the apothecary and chemist of the medicine.
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I had learned of Gertrude Stein's bon mot that medicine opened all doors. This prompted me, in different moods, to view my future life as literary psychiatrist, globe-trotting tropical disease specialist, or academic internist.
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If not for the success that medicine has made, I might be part of a much different story right now.
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I didn't invent forensic science and medicine. I just was one of the first people to recognize how interesting it is.
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Colleges will try to get the good students. That's the way to go. When I chaired my department of Materials Engineering at the Technion in 1990, we started a program for which we set the bar very high. It was the highest at the Technion, above electrical engineering and medicine.
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The first step to prescribing the right medicine is to recognize the cause of the illness. And, when it comes to what is ailing the global economy, extreme monetary easing has been more cause than cure. The sooner we recognize that, the stronger and more sustainable the global economic recovery will be.
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Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists. The doctor/psychiatrist figures in my writing are alter egos of a kind, what I would have been had I not become a writer - a personal fantasy that I've fed into my fiction.
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Someone will eventually succeed in this hunt for a longevity pill, and when they do, one of the greatest advances in the history of medicine will have been achieved.
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In 1995, Glaxo bought Burroughs Wellcome and became the presumptive leader in AIDS therapy.
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I entered medicine to use it as a vehicle for social change.
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Medicine sometimes snatches away health, sometimes gives it.
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It's frightening to think with modern medicine and all the technique available to them they can't really help you. In the old days, you know, you were better off because nowadays, they are all specialists. Everyone's becoming better and better at less and less. Eventually someone's going to be superb, at nothing.
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Let the clean air blow the cobwebs from your body. Air is medicine.
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An artist has to train his responses more than other people do. He has to be as disciplined as a mathematician. Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom. It prepares an artist to choose his own limitations.
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And if you like socialized medicine, you will love this government bureaucracy under [then-Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee] Al Gore that will actually cost seniors who get $500 a year in prescription drugs right now - it will end up costing seniors more money and take away control from those seniors.
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I quite like post-apocalyptic films, things like 'Mad Max' for instance, because they are so full on and there is something quite cleansing about the post-apocalyptic because you can see where we all think we're heading.
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I'm really an alarmist when it comes to epidemics. Swine flu now; when SARS was big, I was all freaked out about that, bird flu. That terrifies me.
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If you have no family or friends to aid you . . . turn your face to the Great West and there build up your home and fortune.
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Maybe someone will step up, but they don't have anyone right now.
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There has been a transition from a nuclear-annihilation scenario to an isolated-terrorist-nuclear-bomb scenario. But we're still locked into a mind-set that nuclear war would be so overwhelming that any kind of preparedness would be futile.
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A visual always brings a first impression. But if there's going to be a first impression, I might as well use it to control the story. So why not do something like throw a mask on?
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I started to write about science and medicine at the Washington Post, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
