Cesar Milstein Quotes

What I found was that I thoroughly enjoyed the plumbing of experiment.

Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere.

The sequence of theorist, experimenter, and discovery has occasionally been compared to the sequence of farmer, pig, truffle. The farmer leads the pig to an area where there might be truffles. The pig searches diligently for the truffles. Finally, he locates one, and just as he is about to devour it, the farmer snatches it away.

'Eureka' moments are very, very rare in my experience. It normally takes several weeks of experiments to tease out the truth, even when you have a really pretty good idea of what is going on.

If you are a researcher, you are trying to figure out what the question is as well as what the answer is.

I took lots of photographs and had planned to write a treatise on how it worked, but I quickly got bored with that idea and wrote a scientific fairy tale instead.

All I do is look, listen and try to make sense of what I find, in biological terms.

I wanted to be a scientist. But I had no math skills.

What is not a risk with a parts-per-billion test can always be exposed to a parts-per-trillion examination. If rats cope with .the heaviest dose of a chemical that can be soaked into their food and water, you can always gavage them. Or try mice or rabbits. Again, the only stopping rule is discovery of the sought-for effect, or exhaustion of the investigator (or his funds). Many of the risk assessment procedures used today are logically indistinguishable from those used by the Inquisition.

if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.

You can't possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you're a fool.

Physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up, and they keep their curiosity.

Design, art, and science are all a melange.

At school, I was fanatical about being a scientist.

Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.

We need to not reduce but increase our commitment to research.

Science is not a collection of facts; it is a process of discovery.

Research in the natural sciences operates in successive approximations. We are glad to be able to offer many good problems for research by generations to come.

Personally I'm more into science and engineering types of things, not so much into testing 'Star Wars' myths.

I was brought up as a physicist.

Children are just little scientists.

An experiment not worth doing is not worth doing well.

I am a firm believer, that without speculation there is no good and original observation.

We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don't stand up to experimentation, Buddha's own words must be rejected.

The love of experiment was very strong in him [Charles Darwin], and I can remember the way he would say, "I shan't be easy till I have tried it," as if an outside force were driving him. He enjoyed experimenting much more than work which only entailed reasoning, and when he was engaged on one of his books which required argument and the marshalling of facts, he felt experimental work to be a rest or holiday.