David Baltimore Quotes
Breakthroughs are by definition unpredicted events. Therefore predicting breakthroughs is a particularly difficult business.
David Baltimore, Scientist and President, California Institute of Technology, Los Angeles Public LibraryFebruary 5, 2001
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This quotation became the mantra of the MIT Media Lab's Professor Hugh Herr and others whose total efforts are spend inventing things for the future.
Many of his greatest ideas were not sufficiently appreciated by many other scientists nor the businessmen who funded scientific projects then. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.
Bush and some religious fundamentalists believe that even a fertilized human egg cell created for in vitro fertilization and not needed, is an incipient life. As such they oppose any use of these cells for anything but procreation of human life, and many oppose the concept of in vitro fertilization completely as it involves the killing and trivialization of life. Most Americans disagree and want to use the excess of fertilized eggs for research and help prolong and sustain life.
David Baltimore is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He is currently President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he served as president from 1997 to 2006. He also served as the director of the Joint Center for Translational Medicine, which joined Caltech and UCLA in a program to translate basic scientific discoveries into clinical realities. He also formerly served as president of Rockefeller University from 1990 to 1991, founder and Director of the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research from 1982 to 1990, and was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.
