Scientific Education Quotes

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.

If Pakistan is to take its proper place among the progressive nations of the world, it will have to take up a good deal of leeway in the realm of scientific and technical education…

I would love to be remembered for ridding the world of disease, but my knowledge of science comes from episodes of 'Nova' and shows on the Discovery Channel. I don't think a superficial understanding of shark behavior and black holes can help cure diseases.

I've been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture. I've been wondering about this, because our civilization is completely dependent on science and high technology, yet most of us are alienated from science.

My dream was to be a 'scientist' even before I knew what a scientist did.

If any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power.

Scientists must venture outside their comfort zones to show the public how cool - and how important - their work really is.

The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress upon relatively unimportant modern work, and to present masses of detail of doubtful truth and questionable weight in such a way as to obscure principles.

Written in 1895, Alfred Nobel's will endowed prizes for scientific research in chemistry, physics, and medicine. At that time, these fields were narrowly defined, and researchers were often classically trained in only one discipline. In the late 19th century, knowledge of science was not a requisite for success in other walks of life.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

Science is the best idea humans have ever had. The more people who embrace that idea, the better.

If scientists can't communicate with the public, with policy makers, with one another, the future is going to be held back. We're not going to have the future that we could have.

My sense, talking to the general public around the country, is that most people don't have a very high level of scientific literacy.

I was interested in science before I even knew what science was.

Research in any domain of science today requires specialized training to build up knowledge and clinical competence. To make major breakthroughs, we need people with expertise who are engaged in sustained research over a long period of time - in a word, scientists.

Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.

Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess.

Scientific concepts sometimes elude the vast majority of elected officials.

If scientists could communicate more in their own voices - in a familiar tone, with a less specialized vocabulary - would a wide range of people understand them better? Would their work be better understood by the general public, policy-makers, funders, and, even in some cases, other scientists?

At school, I was fanatical about being a scientist.

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

The time I trust will come, perhaps within the lives of some of us, when the outline of this science will be clearly made out and generally recognised, when its nomenclature will be fixed, and its principles form a part of elementary instruction.

In 1986, I was asked by the then-Dean of Science at the University of British Columbia, Dr. R.C. Miller, Jr., to establish a new interdisciplinary institute, the Biotechnology Laboratory. I decided that it was time for me to start paying back for the thirty years of fun that I had been able to have in research.

Science as an intellectual exercise enriches our culture, and is in itself ennobling.