I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don't like tidying up the garden afterwards.
I first studied the effect of plants on humans for my Yale thesis... and it was a 185-page thesis, and luckily I got honors on it.
Is it philosophical, is it quite allowable, to assume without evidence from fossil plants that the family or any of the genera was once larger and wide spread? and occupied a continuous area?
I have always been fascinated by plants. I have always preferred plants to human beings. They give me an enormous amount of solace.
We are seeing the cells of plants and animals more and more clearly as chemical factories, where the various products are manufactured in separate workshops.
I remember being amazed that actors had a union. I thought only coal miners had unions, or guys that worked in automobile plants. That's an indication of how naive I was.
My family owned a bunch of pharmaceutical manufacturing plants and other consumer-goods manufacturing plants. We would license Western goods and manufacture them in Iran and distribute them throughout the Middle East.
The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction was a horrible event. Dinosaurs and many other animals and plants were killed.
The important thing is that we now have the tools to sequence all kinds of animals and plants and microbes - as well as humans. It is not important that we didn't actually finish the human sequence yet.