Word: andromedae
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...your article on recombinant DNA [April 18] your reporter quoted me as saying: "Those who claim we are letting loose an Andromeda strain are either hysterics or are trying to wreck a whole new field of research." My actual view is this: "Claims about letting loose an Andromeda strain are promoting public hysteria and may wreck a whole new field of research...
...painting, to enter, look, note and depart. No one observant could refuse them. But there are new discoveries here, too--and they are perhaps even more intriguing, because less famous. Ammi Philips's Portrait of Harriet Leavins (1815) strikingly modern in its primitiveness; or Ingres's Study for Andromeda, a fascinating closeup of a lone marble woman that lets you see how Ingres sculpted his figures to achieve that smooth sensuality of form; or Monet's Fish (1870) whose glinting gold and silver scales formed of his brushstrokes, are the perfect fusion of technique and subject; or Sargent's Breakfast...
...that those who worry about infections are totally ignorant of medicine's long history of safely handling highly contagious bacteria and viruses. Nor, he says, do they understand how difficult it is for a microbe to become pathogenic. He adds: "Those who claim we are letting loose an Andromeda strain are either hysterics or are trying to wreck a whole new field of research." Less acerbically, Chemist John Abelson pointed out in last week's Science that in five years of work with recombinant DNA there has not been a single reported case of infection. The evidence...
Dawkins answers his own question by giving another analogy (I have never read a book with so many analogies, most of them false). This time the analogy comes from a science fiction book Dawkins once read called A for Andromeda...
...book that he is simply a nice zoologist who is attempting to simplify complex scientific data so more people can understand and appreciate it. But then he goes off on wild tangents, stringing together stupid analogies and speculating about the similarities between purine molecules and some futuristic society in Andromeda out of a science fiction novel he happened to find interesting. This type of rambling based on half-baked ideas that should have been kept in the oven doesn't exactly constitute the stuff of which great works of non-fiction are made...