Wisdom in fragments

Freedom of expression, the right to explore, the right to have the adventure of intellectual discovery is a deep personal right precisely because it is a deep personal pleasure.

The standard model of reason is the lone thinker — Rodin’s statue, head on fist. That is exactly the wrong model of reasoning. Reasoning evolved to be done in groups; it is a contested process. We think better in opposition with somebody we disagree with.

Difference is not something we need to solve. Difference is something we need to love. Difference is something we need to respect — because it is in the clash of difference that the great ideas emerge.

Conservatives and liberals are wandering around with different brains. They have different tools with which to apprehend the world, and therefore they are seeing different worlds — which inform the politics that emanate from that experience.

We assume that the person in front of us is essentially a broken version of us. When you realise that the person opposite you is not a broken version of you, but a very different kind of person, it forces you to take their perspective seriously.

There is no sense in which we are predestined to our opinions. But the fact that we are predisposed to them rather demands that we understand those predispositions — because otherwise we are, in a sense, victims of them.

Hot and humid climates tend to promote a kind of right-wing, slightly authoritarian politics — because hot and humid environments are also pathogen-rich, and over thousands of years, societies in those climates have developed what scientists call behavioural immunity.

Most studies today show that our political leaning is at least 50 per cent genetic in origin — genetics is as important, if not more important, to how you vote than your cultural context, your economic context, and all the evidence you engage with in the world.

I am still a physiologist. I am not absorbed by the pharmaceutical industry. I have stuck to my laboratory, to the science.

It should remain a prescription drug — because you need instructions at the same time on what to do.

We have a compound that, as one of its main functions, really addresses precisely this. It remedies the inflammation and the toxic consequences of obesity.

All of this was unexpected. The entire development was unexpected. Nobody could really believe that this would happen.

Nobody in the beginning believed that it was possible to create an obesity treatment with this kind of drug. Everybody would say, “oh, it’s their own fault.”

It was possible to get up to 0.4 milligrammes per day, and all of a sudden there was a 14 to 15 per cent weight loss. That changed the whole picture.

What we have in the colon may actually be a kind of defence system regulating the mucosal integrity of the body.

It is, in fact, what we call an enterogastrone hormone — an ileal brake hormone — that sends the signal that enough is enough, stop.