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). Richard Preston Read Quote
Scientific facts are often described in textbooks as if they just sort of exist, like nickels someone picked up on the street. But science at the cutting edge, conducted by sharp minds probing deep into nature, is not about self-evident facts. It is about mystery and not knowing. It is about taking huge risks. Richard Preston Read Quote
Whatever happens to the great systems of nature will also be what happens to us. Richard Preston Read Quote
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. Richard Preston Read Quote
Botanists have a tradition of never revealing the exact location of a rare plant. Contact between humans and rare plants is generally risky for the plants. Richard Preston Read Quote
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. Richard Preston Read Quote
Though the redwoods in Muir Woods are hauntingly beautiful trees, they are relatively small and not very tall, at least for redwoods. Richard Preston Read Quote
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. Richard Preston Read Quote
First Light’ is nonfiction, a true story about astronomers who are looking for light coming from the edge of the universe. It tells how science is really done – and science is a lot weirder and more human than most people realize. Richard Preston Read Quote
First Light’ has gotten a reputation as a kind of cult classic about science. I never really intended it to be read as a science book, but books, like children, have a way of choosing their own friends. Richard Preston Read Quote
