Joshua Lederberg Quotes

There is no area of the world that should not be investigated by scientists. There will always remain some questions that have not been answered. In general, these are the questions that have not yet been posed.

I missed the basic curiosity of being in the lab.

As a child, I was fascinated by any branch of physical or biological science. Even today, I find great excitement in discovering the complexity and variability of the world we live in, getting a glimpse into the deeper reality that we mostly ignore in our everyday human activities.

I see no difference between scientific exploration and human exploration.

Science is about exploring, and the only way to uncover the secrets of the universe is to go and look.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Experimentalists never know when their work is finished.

Science is the topography of ignorance.

A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions.

Without science, there would be no such hope.

That's, of course, the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.

A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.

That's the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.

I really like research.

Research sometimes feels like an ongoing TV series in which some amazing revelations have already been made, but there are still plenty of cliff-hangers and unresolved plotlines that you want to see resolved. But unlike TV, we have to do the work ourselves to figure out what happens next.

Science isn't just for guys in lab coats, you know? It's for anybody who wants to do a good job of understanding and investigating the world.

We haven't found anything that we can't explain at all. I hope that will happen.

A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.

For nearly a quarter of a century, I have been engaged in the investigation of the fundamentals of life, the material universe and human behavior. Such an adventure leads one down many highways, through many byroads, into many back alleys of uncertainty, through many strata of life...

Every one who has seriously investigated a novel question, who has really interrogated Nature with a view to a distinct answer, will bear me out in saying that it requires intense and sustained effort of imagination.

But nature did not deem it her business to make the discovery of her laws easy for us.

You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.