Science

"We err upwards." Gerhard Vollmer

"'Enemies of science' are not the people who question numbers, studies, and measures, but those who want to suppress open debate about them. Blaming and excluding others may give us psychological relief, but it won’t solve the COVID crisis—which by now is more of a societal crisis than a purely health-related one." Dr. Alexander Zinn

"When a doctor walks behind the coffin of his patient, sometimes the cause really is following the effect." Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch

"The genome was considered to be the unchanging blueprint of human beings, determined at the beginning of our lives. Science must now abandon this idea. In reality, our genetic makeup is constantly changing. Two years ago, 25 geneticists gathered at the University of California, Berkeley, to answer a seemingly simple question: What is a gene? However, the attempt to precisely define the basic concept of their field proved to be extremely difficult. The meeting of experts almost ended in disaster, recalls Karen Eilbeck, professor of human genetics at Berkeley and host of the roundtable: “We had hours of meetings. Everyone was yelling at each other.” The dispute in Berkeley had little to do with researcher vanity. It was the first sign that the life sciences—still unnoticed by the public—were on the verge of a turning point. What researchers are uncovering in the chromosome strands of humans and animals is breaking with previous patterns of thinking in genetics. Much like at the beginning of the 20th century, when Einstein and his colleagues formed a new physical worldview, the age of relativistic genetics may now be dawning. Medical research in particular is facing new challenges. Initial outlines are becoming apparent: the body and soul, their health, illness, development, and aging are subject to a genetic interplay whose complexity exceeds all previous ideas. Geneticists must abandon their image of a stable genome in which changes are pathological exceptions. Everyone's genetic material is constantly undergoing change. The result: every organism, every human being, even every cell in the body is a genetic universe unto itself." Ulrich Bahnsen

"To fanciful minds and theoretical speculators, the so-called "science" of modern astronomy furnishes a field, unsurpassed in any science for the unrestrained license of the imagination, and the building up of a complicated conjuration of absurdities such as to overawe the simpleton and make him gape with wonder" Thomas Winship

"No one in their right mind would let a sixteen-year-old whose parents gave them an anatomy atlas for Christmas remove their appendix. No one who wants to build a house for themselves and their family would hire a sixteen-year-old architect who has only built sandcastles so far. And no one who can tell the difference between a hedge fund and a building society savings agreement would entrust their fortune to a sixteen-year-old. But when it comes to the climate and the world we live in, noisy children suddenly mutate into esteemed prophets of impending doom." Henryk M. Broder

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" Upton Sinclair

"We must be aware that even people who have been vaccinated three times can transmit the disease... It is obvious that we are a long way from the 95 percent efficacy we achieved against the original virus." Ugur Sahin

"Vaccines, for Bill Gates, are a strategic philanthropy that feed his many vaccine-related businesses (including Microsoft’s ambition to control a global vac ID enterprise) and give him dictatorial control over global health policy—the spear tip of corporate neo-imperialism. Gates’ obsession with vaccines seems fueled by a messianic conviction that he is ordained to save the world with technology and a god-like willingness to experiment with the lives of lesser humans." Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"The biggest joke. The idea of installing Mr. Lauterbach as health minister is the biggest joke since Caligula appointed his horse as consul. The claim that he is an experienced doctor is completely unfounded, and the further claim that he is a trained epidemiologist is equally false. Mr. Lauterbach is not accepted by any serious scientist as an expert or anything of the sort. With 50 years of medical experience as a health policy maker for the CSU, I am certainly qualified to judge who could meet the minimum requirements here. God save us from Mr. Lauterbach." Prof. Wolfgang Pförringer

"The current BN162 (Comirnaty) vaccine can induce antibody formation against the alpha and beta variants under laboratory conditions. No data is available on later variants. There has been no variant adaptation of the vaccine since the start of the vaccination campaign, and no adaptation is planned for the boosters. There is no general recommendation for a booster, and the benefits of vaccination must always be weighed up on an individual basis," BioNTech

"The vaccine was not specifically designed for the Delta variant, but for a virus that is no longer circulating today, says the virologist. Therefore, the third dose is now necessary for everyone." Christian Drosten

"There is something totalitarian about requiring a person, under threat of punishment, to have a liquid injected into their body. This would only be justified in exceptional cases." Kai Möller

"The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas in every epoch, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has at its disposal the means of material production has at the same time at its disposal the means of intellectual production, so that, on average, the thoughts of those who lack the means of intellectual production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the ruling material conditions, the ruling material conditions conceived as ideas; that is, the conditions that make one class the ruling class, the ideas of its rule." Marx/Engels