Richard Preston

“If a healthy person were placed on the other side of a room from a person who was sick with AIDS, the AIDS virus would not be able to drift across the room through the air and infect the healthy person.”

“When a parasite moves to a new habitat, it can find new hosts through a process called the trans-species jump. Often, the new host has no resistance; it and the parasite haven't had time to adjust to each other through natural selection (it is frequently not in the best interest of a parasite to kill its host quickly).”

“If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, then children are somewhat closer to our roots as primates in the arboreal forest. Humans appear to be the only primates that I know of that are afraid of heights. All other primates, when they're scared, they run up a tree, where they feel safe.”

“A football player is often bigger than a basketball player - more massive, that is. The basketball player is taller and more slender. So it is with redwoods. The tallest redwoods are often slender, and so they aren't the largest ones.”

“When you get up into the crown of a redwood tree, you lose sight of the ground entirely. You also lose sight of the sky. And you're in a lost world. You're in an undiscovered, unexplored ecosystem, somewhere between Heaven and Earth, filled with forms of life, not all of which have been given names by scientists yet.”

“Initially, there were a lot of fears that Ebola could mutate to become the airborne Andromeda strain that would wipe us all out.”

“The annual flight of the dragonflies goes mostly unnoticed, though it is one of the great migrations of flying creatures that occur across North America.”

“The redwoods you can see in Muir Woods are nothing like the redwood titans that stand in the rainforest valleys of the North Coast, closer to Oregon. These are the dreadnoughts of trees, the blue whales of the plant kingdom.”

“Redwood rainforest has five to 10 times the biomass - that's the sheer weight of living material - of, say, deep tropical rainforest in the Amazon basin.”

“In the course of writing 'First Light,' I climbed all over and through the Hale Telescope, where I found rooms, stairways, tunnels, and abandoned machines leaking oil. My notebooks show tooth-marks where I gripped them with my teeth while climbing around inside the telescope, and the notebooks are stained with Flying Horse telescope oil.”

“Seeing outward is equivalent to looking backward in time because the telescope's mirror is capturing primeval light... galaxies that existed before our time.”

“The genome could be thought of as a kind of piano with twenty-five thousand keys. In some cases, a few keys may be out of tune, which can cause the music to sound wrong. In others, if one key goes dead the music turns into a cacophony, or the whole piano self-destructs.”

“Whatever happens to the great systems of nature will also be what happens to us.”

“Life on the planet is being homogenized by the expanding human population and the frequent and rapid movement of people and goods, which carry invasive organisms with them. These invasives often flourish in their new ecosystems because, like the woolly adelgid, they have escaped their predators.”

“I'm all in favor of looking deeply into as much as we possibly can. I'm not afraid of knowledge... With all new technology, weapons inevitably emerge... Evil comes out of the human heart. It doesn't come out of nature.”

“The crown of a supertall redwood has a towering, cloudy, irregular form, and the crowns of the tallest redwoods can sometimes look like the plume of exhaust from a rocket taking off.”

“The earth's biosphere could be thought of as a sort of palace. The continents are rooms in the palace; islands are smaller rooms. Each room has its own decor and unique inhabitants; many of the rooms have been sealed off for millions of years. The doors in the palace have been flung open, and the walls are coming down.”

“If a portion of a redwood is rotting, the redwood will send roots into its own form and draw nutrients out of itself as it falls apart. If we had redwood-like biology, if we got a touch of gangrene in our arm, then we could just, you know, extract the nutrients and the moisture out of it until it fell off.”

“There may be a little bit of finger-pointing - there always is in a situation like this - but I think of Ebola as an act of nature. It's the biological equivalent of a tsunami, and yes, we are having trouble handling it.”

“If you want to survive Ebola, you need to be young. If you're in your late 30s, the death rate is about 80 percent, and if you're over 45, then the death rate goes up to about 90 percent.”