Carol W. Greider Quotes

If a scientist is not befuddled by what they're looking at, then they're not a research scientist.

I love to watch how scientists' minds work.

True science is never speculative; it employs hypotheses as suggesting points for inquiry, but it never adopts the hypotheses as though they were demonstrated propositions.

Hypotheses are what we lack the least.

I feel like every time a door is opened by science, suddenly there are a hundred doors that need to get opened. That's what makes it an everlasting, interesting experience to go through.

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

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

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.

Why should there be the method of science? There is not just one way to build a house, or even to grow tomatoes. We should not expect something as motley as the growth of knowledge to be strapped to one methodology.

When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There's something that might be called the 'graduate student syndrome'; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.

For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin.

The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.

It is impossible to devise an experiment without a preconceived idea; devising an experiment, we said, is putting a question; we never conceive a question without an idea which invites an answer. I consider it, therefore, an absolute principle that experiments must always be devised in view of a preconceived idea, no matter if the idea be not very clear nor very well defined.

Natural science is founded on minute critical views of the general order of events taking place upon our globe, corrected, enlarged, or exalted by experiments, in which the agents concerned are placed under new circumstances, and their diversified properties separately examined. The body of natural science, then, consists of facts; is analogy,-the relation of resemblance of facts by which its different parts are connected, arranged, and employed, either for popular use, or for new speculative improvements.

With science, ideas can germinate within a bed of theory, form, and practice that assists their growth... But we as gardeners, must beware... for some seeds are the seeds of ruin... and the most iridescent blooms are often the most dangerous

Over the years, a number of other intriguing experimental ideas and areas of investigation have been the objects of my attention, and I have devoted some time and effort to exploring the inherent possbilities.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

My three years at the NIH were critical in my scientific education. I learned an immense amount about the research process: developing assays, purifying macromolecules, documenting a discovery by many approaches, and writing clear manuscripts describing what is known and what remains to be investigated.

If you're a physicist, for heaven's sake, and here is the experiment, and you have a theory, and the theory doesn't agree with the experiment, then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory.

In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.

In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a 'failed experiment.' Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.

Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

Frequently, I have been asked if an experiment I have planned is pure or applied research; to me, it is more important to know if the experiment will yield new and probably enduring knowledge about nature.