John Tyler Bonner Quotes

You have people who believe they are scientifically literate but, in fact, are not. And I don't mind if you're not scientifically literate, but just admit that to yourself, so that you'll know, and perhaps you can take a first step to try to eradicate that.

Of course there are depressing periods when nothing appears to be happening. But whenever anything was happening, and even when nothing was happening, it was fun just to do phage experiments.

I don't watch that much TV, so I can't compare one show to another. When I watch television, I watch people talking to one another usually or a science show where they show me microbes, you know. Microbes actually communicate quite a bit, and so there's a lot of talking going on.

The cosmical importance of this conclusion is profound and the possibilities it opens for the future very remarkable, greater in fact than any suggested before by science in the whole history of the human race.

Perhaps the most useful lesson which has come out of the work on penicillin has been the demonstration that success in this field depends on the development and coordinated use of technical methods.

What's great about bacteria is you have a surprise every day waiting for you because they're so fast, they grow overnight.

My own beliefs are that the road to a scientific discovery is seldom direct and that it does not necessarily require great expertise. In fact, I am convinced that often a newcomer to a field has a great advantage because he is ignorant and does not know all the complicated reasons why a particular experiment should not be attempted.

Microbes are doing things we didn't even know they could do 10 years ago.

When I began playing around at being a physical chemist, I enjoyed very much doing work on the structure of DNA molecules, something which I would never have dreamed of doing before I started.

Today, we're still loaded down - and, to some extent, embarrassed - by ancient myths, but we respect them as part of the same impulse that has led to the modern, scientific kind of myth. But we now have the opportunity to discover, for the first time, the way the universe is in fact constructed as opposed to how we would wish it to be constructed.

Science is among the most profoundly human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanising effects of technology, science, in fact, remains our last stand against it.

Nikola Tesla spent one of his most productive years in Colorado Springs.

I've always been fascinated with science and exploring our world, from microbes to the solar system.

I play with microbes. There are, of course, many rules to this play...but when you have acquired knowledge and experience it is very pleasant to break the rules and to be able to find something nobody has thought of.

Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and publications.

These microscopic organisms form an entire world composed of species, families and varieties whose history, which has barely begun to be written, is already fertile in prospects and findings of the highest importance. The names of these organisms are very numerous and will have to be defined and in part discarded. The word microbe which has the advantage of being shorter and carrying a more general meaning, and of having been approved by my illustrious friend, M. Littré, the most competent linguist in France, is one we will adopt.

Out of man's mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment.

In the past thirty years we have learned more about the workings of the human brain than in all of previous history.

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

[X-ray's] accidental discovery in the late 1800s fits seamlessly into modernity's fascination with, and belief in, the power of technological transparency: the desire to domesticate time (cinema), to preserve and capture the surface of the fleeting (photography), to see inside (x-ray).

Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry.

One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.

The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger.

Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy ... Many of the great 19th-century discoveries were made by men who had independent wealth-Charles Darwin is the prototype. They trusted themselves.