“If this isn’t ‘the fleecing of America’ I don’t know what is.”
Representative Bart Gordon, a member of the US House Science Committee, seeking to remove chiefs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration after it was revealed that NOAA’s weather forecasting programme was $7 billion over budget (Committee on Science Democratic Caucus press release, 15 May)
“Instead of studying signals from the Crab nebula, we may start to pick up light from real crabs and think these are coming from outer space. That would rather spoil things.”
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Monty Priede of the University of Aberdeen, UK, on how bioluminescent crustaceans could mess up plans to put a neutrino detector on the Mediterranean sea floor (The Observer, London, 14 May)
“We can’t exclude everyone who got bit by a mosquito.”
Lewis W. Teperman, director of transplantation at New York University, on the difficulty of screening organ donors for the West Nile virus. One of his patients died after receiving an infected liver (The New York Times, 16 May)
“People don’t realize the old trick is you put dishwashing soap [on the deck] and they slide right off.”
Hank Wiessner of Fun Zone Boat Company in Newport Beach, California, on tests that use high-tech automated sprinklers to scare off sea lions that clamber onto boats (The Orange County Register, Santa Ana, California, 15 May)
“[It] is a sign of just how important I believe it is that as many people as possible stand up against the tiny group of extremists threatening medical research.”
UK prime minister Tony Blair on why he is signing an online petition in support of animal testing (The Sunday Telegraph, London, 14 May)
