Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything

“without my learning any chemistry . . .” Watson, The Double Helix , p. 28.

“the results of which were obtained ‘fortuitously’ . . .” Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits , p. 356.

“In a severely unflattering portrait . . .” Watson, The Double Helix , p. 26.

“in the summer of 1952 she posted a mock notice . . .” White, Rivals , p. 257; and Maddox, p. 185.

“apparently without her knowledge or consent.” PBS website, “A Science Odyssey,” undated.

“Years later Watson conceded. . .” Quoted in Maddox, p. 317.

“a 900-word article by Watson and Crick titled ‘A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.’ ” De Duve, vol. 2, p. 290.

“It received a small mention in the News Chronicle . . .” Ridley, Genome , p. 50.

“Franklin rarely wore a lead apron . . .” Maddox, p. 144.

“It took over twenty-five years . . .” Crick, What Mad Pursuit , p. 74.

“That Was the Molecular Biology That Was.” Keller, p. 25.

“rather like the keys of a piano . . .” National Geographic , “Secrets of the Gene,” October 1995, p. 55.

“Guanine, for instance, is the same stuff . . .” Pollack, p. 23.

“you could say all humans share nothing . . .” Discover , “Bad Genes, Good Drugs,” April 2002, p. 54.

“they are good at getting themselves duplicated.” Ridley, Genome , p. 127.

“Altogether, almost half of human genes . . .” Woolfson, p. 18.

“Empires fall, ids explode . . .” Nuland, p. 158.

“Here were two creatures . . .” BBC Horizon , “Hopeful Monsters,” first transmitted 1998.

“At least 90 percent correlate at some level . . .” Nature , “Sorry, Dogs-Man’s Got a New Best Friend,” December 19-26, 2002, p. 734.

“We even have the same genes for making a tail . . .” Los Angeles Times (reprinted in Valley News ), December 9, 2002.

“dubbed homeotic (from a Greek word meaning “similar”) . . .” BBC Horizon , “Hopeful Monsters,” first transmitted 1998.

“We have forty-six chromosomes . . .” Gribbin and Cherfas, p. 53.

“The lungfish, one of the least evolved . . .” Schopf, p. 240.

“Perhaps the apogee (or nadir) . . .” Lewontin, p. 215.

“How fast a man’s beard grows . . .” Wall Street Journal, “What Distinguishes Us from the Chimps? Actually, Not Much,” April 12, 2002, p. 1.

“the proteome is much more complicated than the genome.” Scientific American , “Move Over, Human Genome,” April 2002, pp. 44-45.

“they will allow themselves to be phosphorylated, glycosylated, acetylated, ubiquitinated . . .” The Bulletin , “The Human Enigma Code,” August 21, 2001, p. 32.

“Drink a glass of wine . . .” Scientific American , “Move Over, Human Genome,” April 2002, pp. 44-45.

“Anything that is true of E. coli . . .” Nature , “From E. coli to Elephants,” May 2, 2002, p. 22.

“ The Times ran a small story . . .” Williams and Montaigne, p. 198.

“Spring never came and summer never warmed.” Officer and Page, pp. 3-6.

“One French naturalist named de Luc . . .” Hallam, p. 89.

“and the other abundant clues . . .” Hallam, p. 90.

“The naturalist Jean de Charpentier told the story . . .” Hallam, p. 90.

“He lent Agassiz his notes . . .” Hallam, pp. 92-93.

“there are three stages in scientific discovery . . .” Ferris, The Whole Shebang , p. 173.

“In his quest to understand the dynamics of glaciation . . .” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , p. 182.

“William Hopkins, a Cambridge professor . . .” Hallam, p. 98.

“He began to find evidence for glaciers . . .” Hallam, p. 99.

“ice had once covered the whole Earth . . .” Gould, Time’s Arrow , p. 115.

“When he died in 1873 Harvard felt it necessary . . .” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , p. 197.

“Less than a decade after his death . . .” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , p. 197.

“For the next twenty years . . .” Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age , p. 51.

“The cause of ice ages . . .” Chorlton, Ice Ages , p. 101.

“It is not necessarily the amount of snow . . .” Schultz, p. 72.

“The process is self-enlarging . . .” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , p. 205.

“you would have been hard pressed to find a geologist . . .” Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age , p. 60.

“we are still very much in an ice age . . .” Schultz, Ice Age Lost , p. 5.

“a situation that may be unique in Earth’s history.” Gribbin and Gribbin, Fire on Earth , p. 147.

“at least seventeen severe glacial episodes . . .” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier , p. 148.

“about fifty more glacial episodes . . .” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , p. 4.

“Earth had no regular ice ages . . .” Stevens, p. 10.

“the Cryogenian, or super ice age.” McGuire, p. 69.

“The entire surface of the planet . . .” Valley News (from Washington Post ), “The Snowball Theory,” June 19, 2000, p. C1.

“the wildest weather it has ever experienced . . .” BBC Horizon transcript, “Snowball Earth,” February 22, 2001, p. 7.

“known to science as the Younger Dryas,” Stevens, p. 34.

“a vast unsupervised experiment . . .” New Yorker , “Ice Memory,” January 7, 2002, p. 36.

“a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates . . .” Schultz, p. 72.

“No less intriguing are the known ranges . . .” Drury, p. 268.

“a retreat to warmer climes wasn’t possible.” Thomas H. Rich, Patricia Vickers-Rich, and Roland Gangloff, “Polar Dinosaurs,” unpublished manuscript.

“there is a lot more water for them to draw on . . .” Schultz, p. 159.

“If so, sea levels globally would rise . . .” Ball, p. 75.

“‘Did you have a good ice age?’ ” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier , p. 267.

“Just before Christmas 1887 . . .” National Geographic , May 1997, p. 87.

“found by railway workers in a cave . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 149.

“The first formal description . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 173.

“the name and credit for the discovery . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, pp. 3-6.

“T. H. Huxley in England drily observed . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 59.

“He did no digging himself . . .” Gould, Eight Little Piggies , pp. 126-27.

“In fact, many anthropologists think it is modern . . .” Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones , p. 47.

“If it is an erectus bone . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 144.

“with nothing but a scrap of cranium and one tooth . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 154.

“Schwalbe thereupon produced a monograph . . .” Walker and Shipman, p. 50.