Best 15 quotes of Michael Specter on MyQuotes

All the food we eat - every grain of rice and kernel of corn - has been genetically modified. None of it was here before mankind learned to cultivate crops. The question isnt whether our food has been modified, but how.

Benjamin Franklin refused to have one of his children vaccinated against smallpox. The four-year-old boy died, and Franklin wrote later of how mistaken he was to expose him to the needless risk.

Daily vitamins are of no value.

Flu is easily transmitted, so if you are working with sick people - who are most at risk for getting seriously ill - you ought to be vaccinated. I am not really equipped to say whether it should be the law or not.

I have never earned one penny from any pharmaceutical company. I will never accept one penny from them either. Ever.

In the Internet age, with the screaming on the radio, etc., it is hard to know what to believe and who is informed and who is not.

I started to write about science and medicine at the Washington Post, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

I think it is true that you can eat extremely healthy food at McDonald's, and you can eat amazingly badly at Chipotle.

I think it's too soon to say that, and I think, basically - most of the people that I ran across and most of the studies that I saw suggest people don't go to McDonald's to eat healthy food. They go to eat fries and cheeseburgers.

It is not possible to assert publicly that Monsanto is anything other than venal without being accused of being a sellout, a fraud, or worse.

I understand the horrors of having no insurance, but, believe me, eight hours of sleep and good meals are NOT going to prevent you from getting sick. Don't gamble with your life; it's a stupid bet.

People wrap themselves in their beliefs. And they do it in such a way that you can't set them free. Not even the truth will set them free.

Vaccination is a public health issue because influenza is a highly contagious disease. If you don't vaccinate your child, his or her schoolmates are much more likely to become ill. That is why some places (New York, for example) are making the vaccine mandatory for school children.

Your dollar cheeseburger isn't a dollar if you factor in what it's going to cost in health care.

Concepts of memory tend to reflect the technology of the times. Plato and Aristotle saw memories as thoughts inscribed on wax tablets that could be erased easily and used again. These days, we tend to think of memory as a camera or a video recorder, filming, storing, and recycling the vast troves of data we accumulate throughout our lives. In practice, though, every memory we retain depends upon a chain of chemical interactions that connect millions of neurons to one another. Those neurons never touch; instead, they communicate through tiny gaps, or synapses, that surround each of them. Every neuron has branching filaments, called dendrites, that receive chemical signals from other nerve cells and send the information across the synapse to the body of the next cell. The typical human brain has trillions of these connections. When we learn something, chemicals in the brain strengthen the synapses that connect neurons. Long-term memories, built from new proteins, change those synaptic networks constantly; inevitably, some grow weaker and others, as they absorb new information, grow more powerful.