From the unpromising material of natural history, long seen as the Cinderella of biological science, they fashioned an ideology as powerful and transformative as any philosophy or religion before it.
It was an unpromising storefront—a grubby 1970s exterior that promised a " Vintage Clothes Emporium, all decades, all styles, low prices." But I walked in and stopped in my tracks.
And I happen to see this really tiny study which had the unpromising name, sub-lethal behavior and physiological effects of the biomedical bleeding process on the American horseshoe crab, Limulus Polyphemus.
He is also a risk-taker: at Roche he bet big on three costly trials of drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer and lung cancer, despite unpromising results in early clinical studies.
Chapters with titles as unpromising as " Cistern and Buckets" become some of the novel's most rewarding as Ishmael compares bailing out a sperm-whale's head to midwifery, which leads to reflections on Plato.
He was very strong and clever with his knife and knew how to cut the dry and dead wood away, and could tell when an unpromising bough or twig had still green life in it.