Book: The The Andromeda Strain. Page 2

Simple creatures are much more common than complex organisms. Lives on the Earth three billion people, and it seems to us that it very much until we remember that the ordinary bulb can hold bacteria in ten and even a hundred times more.

It is an undeniable fact that complex organisms are rare on Earth, while simple organisms flourish in abundance. There are millions of species of bacteria and thousands of species of insects; however, the primates represented by a very small number of species, and apes - only four. And finally, the people presented only one view.

A mathematician once joked that binary numbers were the way the account made up by people who have on each hand only one finger.

One of the first rules of air reconnaissance was "shoot more, think less"; to evaluate, to analyze the job of the pilot is not included. This is a matter experts, and pilots who are too interested in what they were photographing, got into trouble. Usually they crashed.

Today he was distraught. And, as always, reacted to a similar condition in his own way: he became deliberately slow, walked slow, thought slow, was working with a boring thorough deliberation. That was the secret of his success. When everything shalel excited, Manchek seemed to have lost the last interest almost started to doze off. The clever way he managed to maintain clarity of thought and objectivity of judgment.

Here he was in the hated role of the administrator. People bored Manchek; the mechanics of managing subordinates and quirks of their characters held no fascination for him. Often he wanted to return to their aerodynamic pipes to the Institute. Especially on those nights when he was called out of bed to quickly solve any stupid question.

Manchek was quite prepared and even predisposed to deal with the crisis of the largest magnitude. However, this does not mean that he immediately recognized the crisis itself.

Every crisis has its beginnings long before the actual onset. Each crisis involved many individuals and characters and they are all unique. The crisis is made by men, who enter into it with their own prejudices, propensities, and predispositions. A crisis is the sum of blunders, misunderstandings, and intuitive insights, the totality of seen and unseen factors.

A crisis is a situation in which the totality of the circumstances, earlier quite acceptable, all of a sudden, with the emergence of some new factor, becomes absolutely unacceptable, and almost indifferent whether the new factor is political, economic or scientific: death of a national hero, price fluctuations, new technical discovery any circumstance may serve impetus for further developments.

Soon, biology has been the fastest growing branch of science: biological knowledge for ten years, literally doubled. Farsighted researchers talked seriously talking about changing genes, controlling evolution, and control of the psyche.

In the days of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon and other celestial bodies than about their own body.

The closer the truth, the more expensive each step.