P. 43 "Plants in these stories appear to be more than mechanical bodies reacting automatically to external stimuli. These scientists described the vegetal sensorium as open, responsive, excitable, and attuned to a world full of other interested bodies. These conversations taught me new things about the phenomena of sense, sensation, and sentience."
P.48 "What I have been learning is that in spite of great effort, mechanism and mechanical analogies have failed to fully disenchant the life sciences. All kinds of enchantments, from animisms to anthropomorphisms, keep bubbling up (see Myers 2014 a; 2015). Indeed, life scientists in the fields of molecular biology and protein modeling have taught me how to see processes of signal transduction, the very molecular phenomena Melissa and I were discussing, not just as the traffic of information from the environment into a cell, but as a complex contact-dance between molecules propagating energies and intensities within and among cells (see Myers 2015). What if signal transduction is not merely a way of transferring ‘information’ from the environment into the cell, but is also a way of ‘transducing’ affects and energies through a body’s excitable cells and tissues?"
P.58-59 " Molecular phenomena set their bodies into motion and, in the process, they became proxies for their molecules. Indeed, I explained, protein modelers not only anthropomorphized their molecules, they also got ‘molecularized’ in the process (see Myers 2015). Melissa was thrilled, ‘The people have been molecularized, Ah! Right’. And I elaborated, ‘These researchers have been so transformed in their intimate encounters with molecules. They learn to move their bodies around like molecules...And so perhaps there is also a kind of “plantification” of the human scientist going on in the plant labs’. "
