“Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocen...” — Frans de Waal Quote

Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.

The role of inequity in society is grossly underestimated. Inequity is not good for your health, basically.

The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.

Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These 'mini-brains' are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food.

Everybody goes up and does something in the private sector that they feel that they can do, and obviously I'm a musician and feel that one of my experiments - because I think there are many that you can do and that you're helped with the ideas of what you could do - yes, would be to see how I would sing in zero gravity.

You accept failure as a possible outcome of some of the experiments. If you don't get failures, you're not pushing hard enough on the objectives.

You can imagine: 99 percent of your experiments fail for one reason or another.

I've never thought I wanted to quit in my research. I would always fail in experiments, which I did at least three times a day.