“Junie says that the worst thing about shame is the way it chains you down. The way it holds your mind hostage and won’t let you go, gnawing from the inside out, feeding on you like a parasite.”
Source: You Don't See Any of This
“Every mad scientist secretly dreams of playing God.”
Source: Symbiont
“There's a thing on Earth, a marine isopod, that eats the tongues of fish and then replaces them so it can keep on stealing the fish's food. But to do so, it has to be a fish tongue as its second job. It's good enough at it that the fish goes on living, and maybe, because the new independent tongue has a load of little scrabbly arms, it's actually better than the old one.”
Source: Alien Clay
“There’s nothing cruel about a vampire or a parasite, she said.”
Source: All Those Vanished Engines
“Film does not replace language, for it cannot exist without it. Film displaces language, exposes the abyss that threatens to engulf every semantic signification. Film parasitizes language, much as the animal does, drawing into its imaginary panorama that which remains undisclosed in discursivity. Cinema is a parasite.”
Source: Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife
“Identification of environments throughout human history that have aided parasite transmission, as well as social or cultural practices that have contributed to infections, can help inform approaches that could be taken to mitigate infections today.”
Source: Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
“The factors facilitating the global emergence of pathogens shared between humans and animals are of particular importance because the diseases they induce have had major impacts on both human and animal health. This transfer of pathogens has ocurred for thousands, if not millions, of years and continues today.”
Source: Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
“Our species has co-evolved alongside many others to which we were in contact, especially through scavenging, hunting, and then animal husbandry, all of which would have exposed us to novel pathogens and zoonotic diseases. As a species, we had to adapt to these new pathogens without the benefits of modern medicine. The newly emerging diseases of recent decades, while novel in themselves, are but a repeat of patterns which humans have survived over several millennia.”
Source: Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
“In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.”
“Today there are almost eight billion people on earth, crowded together and travelling widely -this is 1300 times more than were present when the agricultural revolution began around 10,000 years ago and facilitated the spread of many pathogens.”
Source: Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach