Here is a sampling of quotations from Cornell University faculty, students and staff that have appeared recently in the national and international news media:
"Enough is enough. We shouldn't design any more."-- Hans A. Bethe, professor emeritus of physics, on an effort by him and other scientists involved in the Manhattan Project to urge other scientists to "cease and desist" from developing new weapons of mass destruction, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 31.
"It's one of the world's most remarkable materials. We don't know of any material that even comes close to its combination of strength and flexibility."-- David Grubb, associate professor of materials science engineering, discussing spider silk in a Scripps Howard News Service wire story in the Grand Rapids Press, Jan. 1.
"Are we alone? Certainly not. It's pretty clear that living material, at least in the form of microbes, is pretty common."-- Thomas Gold, professor emeritus of astronomy, discussing the possibility of life on other planets in the Tacoma, Wash., News Tribune, Dec. 29.
"We've put most of our energy into protecting their nesting beaches but there is little we do elsewhere unless we know where they are. They're not highly visible at sea."-- Steven J. Morreale, graduate student who is studying the travel corridors of sea turtles, quoted in the Manila (Philippines) Chronicle, Dec. 9.
"...Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute...may mark the spot where the twisted impulses of feminist jurisprudence were finally restrained by the Constitution. In the meantime, the case certainly helps us chart our way through some of the deepest bogs of feminist confusion."-- Jeremy Rabkin, associate professor of government, in a commentary about a recent court ruling in which a federal district court judge found the Violence Against Women Act unconstitutional, published in the January issue of American Spectator.
"Experience in the 19th century and in New York today shows that fusion tickets do not destroy the sacred two-party system. All they do is permit minor parties to be a little less irrelevant to elections, to express their opinions without taking themselves out of the electoral game."-- Theodore J. Lowi, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions, in an op-ed in the Sacramento Bee, Jan. 1.
"I realized it had distinctive hair on the bottom of its feet that didn't fit any of the North American species that it looked like."-- Kip Will, graduate student, on the official finding of beetle platynus indecentis, a bog beetle which had been misidentified in major collection for most of this century, in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, Jan. 19.
"Children of 8 or 9 may take that time alone to cook something on the stove, or show that they can light the candles on the dining-room table, or look for their father's gun."-- James Garbarino, director of the Family Life Development Center and author of Raising Children in a Socially Toxic Environment, in an article that asks whether it's safe to leave children at home in Parents Magazine, January 1997.