George Andrew Olah Quotes

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.

It's very important for us to see that science is done by people, not just brains but whole human beings, and sometimes at great cost.

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; it's a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

I am not a scientist. I am, rather, an impresario of scientists.

I can't ever remember not wanting to be a scientist.

My three years at the NIH were critical in my scientific education. I learned an immense amount about the research process: developing assays, purifying macromolecules, documenting a discovery by many approaches, and writing clear manuscripts describing what is known and what remains to be investigated.

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.

When I was a child, it was cool to be a scientist.

Small science, which includes most research in the life sciences all over the world, is science directed usually by an individual senior scientist and a small team of junior associates, perhaps three, ten, fifteen, something in that order.

If I could change the science system, my prescription for changing the whole thing would be organising it around big goals and building teams to do it.

I grew up thinking that a research scientist was a natural thing to be.

The U.S. has the finest research scientists in the world, but we are falling far behind other countries, like South Korea and Singapore, that are moving forward with embryonic stem cell research.

In 1995, I founded The Molecular Sciences Institute with a gift from the Philip Morris Company where I hoped that we could create an environment where young people could pursue science in an atmosphere of harmonious purpose and high intellectual challenge.

With the phase-contrast method still in the first somewhat primitive stage, I went in 1932 to the Zeiss Works in Jena to demonstrate. It was not received with such enthusiasm as I had expected.

In 1905, I was privileged to be given a place in the private laboratory of my revered teacher, Professor W. H. Perkin, Jr. at the University of Manchester.

As you know, in most areas of science, there are long periods of beginning before we really make progress.

When I was the NIH director, I often expressed envy of institute directors: they had the money and ran the scientific programmes.

I think becoming a scientist is the product of parents who gave me enormous opportunities to master nature.

The decline in funding for the physical sciences has put our Nation's capabilities for scientific innovation at risk.

The government needs good science, and I’m not willing to abdicate the role of advising the Administration and Congress on [science] policy.

When I grew up, scientists were anti-social people who worked in basements and wore coats and worked with bunson burners, and now they're in our technology every day, and our technology has almost become fashion accessories.

The United States needs to be a leader in scientific research.

Scientists have this stigma of being guys or women in white lab coats with no sense of humor, no passion, devoid of all emotion, and that has been the complete opposite of the scientists I've met.

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.

The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.