Martin Chalfie Quotes

Nowadays, people send rockets into space, and I think it does make you question if there's a God. They can make babies in a dish now! Everything we're seeing goes against what people always believed in.

The development of physics, like the development of any science, is a continuous one.

As for sticking strictly to presently known science, I will simply point out that we have already experienced at least two major revolutions in science in this century alone.

Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now.

The computer can do a much better job than the human eye, as it is much more systematic in analysing tissues.

Consider radiology. Technology is going to reduce the use of those machines because doctors aren't going to need to send patients two or three times for radiology. They're going to have access to what the previous specialist took. There's also going to be devices that are coming out that are much less costly.

Science is the one human activity that is totally progressive.

So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example of the disruptive result that we may constantly expect from the progress of science.

Let us consider under what disadvantages Science has hitherto labored before we pronounce thus confidently on her progress.

Science is the engine of prosperity. All the prosperity we see around us is a byproduct of scientific inventions. And that's not being made clear to young people. If we can't make it clear to young people they're not going to go into science. And science will suffer in the United States.

Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.

Science is the future of mankind.

The modern version of Buridan's ass [a figurative description of a man of indecision] has a Ph.D., but no time to grow up as he is undecided between making a Leonardo da Vinci in the test tube or planting a Coca Cola sign on Mars.

I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science.

It is my earnest desire that some of you should carry on this scientific work and keep for your ambition the determination to make a permanent contribution to science.

The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.

Writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have imagined the sort of scientific utopia which is coming to pass, but already their nightmare fancies are hopelessly out of date. A vast, air-conditioned, neon-lighted, glass-and-chromium broiler-house begins to take shape, in which geneticists select the best stocks to fertilise, and watch over the developing embryo to ensure that all possibilities of error and distortion are eliminated.

Science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly. I mean World War I was a horrible war and it was mostly the fault of science, so that was in a way a very bad time for science, but on the other hand we were winning all these Nobel Prizes.

It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.

Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.

There are two ways in which a science develops; in response to problems which is itself creates, and in response to problems that are forced on it from the outside.

Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.

At every stage of understanding the universe better, the benefits to civilisation have been immeasurable. None of those big leaps were made with us knowing what was going to happen.

The trend lines in research and innovation look good for places such as India and China and less good for America as we go forward. So even if you're not enchanted by the prospect of cosmic discovery, the prospect of dying poor may be what it takes to understand the role of this adventure in the future of the natural world in which we live.