Science Quotes

A few quotes on science I’ve read or heard in lectures.

A good idea is like a good joke. They both have a spark. They make a connection. They require a certain suspension of one’s conventional thinking […] and I think it also requires a playfulness to have good ideas.
- Jeremy Nathans, Creativity in Science

“Cell biologists look; geneticists count; biochemists clean,” the scientist Arthur Kornberg once said. […] Watson and Crick played. They worked methodically, diligently, and carefully— but left enough room for their key strength: lightness. If they were to win this race, it would be through whimsy and intuition; they would laugh their way to DNA.
- Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene (2016)

To have one experiment that works, and keep doing it all the time.
- Alfred Hershey, describing scientific happiness (“Hershey heaven”)

kT giveth, and kT taketh away.
- Harry Noller, lecture at JHMI

[…] our great creative Mother, while she amuses us with apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets, and, in spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results. She permits us, indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birth-Mark” (1843)

In this case, though, as in all of molecular biology, closer inspection not only reveals a wealth of impressive detail, but huge numbers of things which do not so much appear to have been carefully crafted by a divine hand, as much as assembled by a blind lunatic with infinite time, infinite willingness to tinker (and a correspondingly infinite willingness to accept whatever works as soon as it does), and infinite supplies of duct tape, super glue, and baling wire. What’s more, the whole mechanism keeps falling apart over time in subtle (and not so subtle) ways, which just leads to casual repurposing of the altered pieces.
- Derek Lowe, “The Phosphoproteomic Landscape Speaks - What Did It Say, Again?”