Ciba Quotes

Lessi così di tutto un po', disordinatamente; ma libri, in ispecie, di filosofia. Pesano tanto: eppure, chi se ne ciba e se li mette in corpo, vive tra le nuvole.

Ciba: "I thought you were supposed to be some big brave war hero. What about that goddamn gold star you polish every night?" Natalya: "You know what this shiny piece of tin is, you fucking space cadet? It's the way stupid boys trick other stupid boys into dying for bullshit causes ... and I'm done acting like one of them.

I libri pesano tanto: eppure, chi se ne ciba e se li mette in corpo, vive tra le nuvole.

Lessi così di tutto un po', disordinatamente; ma libri, in ispecie, di filosofia. Pesano tanto: eppure, chi se ne ciba e se li mette in corpo, vive tra le nuvole.

Ma i libri [...] pesano tanto: eppure, chi se ne ciba e se li mette in corpo, vive tra le nuvole.

Lynette was from South Africa and had met Robert at age eighteen near Johannesburg, when both were working for the Swiss chemical company Ciba-Geigy. Though Lynette’s first language was Afrikaans, she attended an English-language school at her father’s insistence. After she and Robert moved to Switzerland and later started their family, she spoke English at first to Roger and his older sister, Diana

The chemists at Ciba-Geigy began churning out compound after compound. They weren’t drugs yet; that title could be awarded only after the compound was known to effect some change in the body, not just in a culture of enzymes. During this stage of searching for hits, the chemicals were compounds, candidates, or, if they showed hints of anti-kinase activity, agents. And Matter zealously pushed the chemists to come up with more and more of them, a pressure

whether to become a professor or join a pharmaceutical company. He’d grown frustrated doing experiments simply as an academic exercise. Molecules that he and his fellow researchers had synthesized would be thrown away without being tested for any potential application, the sole goal being to prove that the structure they’d created was the one they’d intended to create. “I always protested,” he recalled. “Wouldn’t it be nice to synthesize something that could be [useful]?” After all, that was what he’d loved about chemistry in the first place: You make something. Just as Lydon had gravitated toward the practicality of kinase research, Zimmermann wanted to be in a place where he could put that urge for application to good use. He opted to return to Ciba-Geigy, joining the oncology group. Alex Matter opened Zimmermann’s

Switzerland, with a population of about seven million, had emerged as an industrial country of importance far beyond its small size, and in the post-World War II period it became one of the richest industrialized countries. By some measures it actually had the highest per capita income in the world by the 1960s. Swiss companies, among them Nestlé, Sandoz, Ciba-Geigy, and Lindt are among the most global of any country, and generally employ far more people outside the country than in Switzerland. The Swiss case, writes Porter (1990: 307–8), ‘vividly illustrates how a small nation, without a large home market as in Japan or America, can nevertheless be a successful global competitor in many important industries. Switzerland is also an economy that has continuously upgraded itself to support a rising standard of living.’ Also Sweden, not significantly larger than Switzerland in terms of population, is the home base of a striking number of large, global companies. Its economy supports a very high standard of living, as well as one of the most highly developed welfare states in the world.

A man named George Daley, yet another member of the Baltimore lab, had finally accomplished this remaining feat. Daley took one group of mice and filled their marrow with the mutant bcr/abl gene present in the Philadelphia chromosome. Next, he destroyed the bone marrow of a second group of mice with radiation. He injected the second group of mice with the marrow from the first group, and the second group of mice developed CML. The experiment established the mutant chromosome, and therefore its protein product, Bcr/Abl, as the sole cause of CML. The proof bolstered Lydon’s belief that the kinase program at Ciba-Geigy should make Abl its top priority. Despite his and Druker’s conviction that Bcr/Abl was the best target for proving the principle of kinase inhibition, the program had

C'era una volta una bambina che leggeva tutto il giorno appollaiata sugli alberi. Una sera, quando la chiamano per cena, si rifiuta di scendere. Cala la notte, ma lei non ha paura. In lontananza si odono dei tuoni, in lontananza i fulmini squarciano il cielo sereno. È la storia di una bambina in equilibrio su un ramo, che si ciba solo di libri. Passano i giorni e la bambina è ancora lassù, la chiamano, la supplicano di scendere, portano scale e sgabelli, le promettono nastri e pianoforti, le promettono la luna. È la favola di una bambina che mangia la carta, pagine su pagine. Ben presto, tutto il corpo le diventa grigio, la pioggia le lascia strisce d'inchiostro sulla pelle. Ben presto, inizia a rimpicciolirsi, diventa minuscola, sottile come una pergamena consunta o come una foglia d'oro. Portano via le scale e gli sgabelli. La lasciano svanire in cima al ramo. Piangono in silenzio, piangono dentro, accanto al fuoco, piangono la bambina che era, in carne e zucchero, piangono quella bambina smarrita che continua a sciogliersi e si chiedono dove trovi ancora la forza per stare aggrappata all'albero. Una sera, il silenzio è rotto dallo scoppio di un temporale. I rami si piegano sotto la furia del vento. Un vento fortissimo, come non si era mai visto. Al mattino, la bambina non c'è più. Ha lasciato un messaggio sull'albero, scarabocchiato su un pezzo di carta. Ma è una frase illeggibile.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, a Brown University anthropologist—who had written about gender and prompted Bo Laurent to start the Intersex Society—rekindled the testosterone conversation in her 2000 book Sexing the Body. She suggested that the term “sex hormones” be changed to “growth hormones,” because that’s what they do. Testosterone and estrogen affect the development not only of the ovaries, testicles, vagina, and penis, but also of the liver, muscles, and bones. Indeed, they influence nearly every cell in the body. “So to think of them as growth hormones,” Fausto-Sterling once told the New York Times, “which they are, is to stop worrying that men have a lot of testosterone and women, estrogen.” Back in 1935, the same year testosterone was named, two scientists working independently figured out how to make the hormone from scratch—the key to mass production. Butenandt, the testosterone-from-pee researcher, was funded by the German company Schering. His competitor Leopold Ruzicka was sponsored by Swiss company Ciba. They both accomplished in the laboratory what the body does on its own: they tweaked a few molecules of cholesterol and turned it into testosterone. Cholesterol (in addition to its notorious reputation as an artery-clogger) also serves as the raw material from which the body makes a variety of hormones. The