Stanley B. Prusiner Quotes
It is crucial for scientists to be willing to be wrong; otherwise, you might not do the most important experiments, or you may ignore your most important findings.
Prusiner, Stanley B. "Science AMA Series: I am Stanley Prusiner, MD, a neurologist and director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at UCSF..." Reddit, 13 May 2014.
This quotation illustrates the largest difference between politicians and scientists. Politicians are always seeking data and confirmation that their ideologies and theories are right. Scientists are always trying to prove the status quo wrong as this is the only way to increase knowledge. Newton showed that the Greeks were wrong and could not explain all of mechanics. Einstein proved that Newton was not quite right. The quantum mechanics scientists showed Einstein was not quote right with small particles and the Hicks Boson found a hole in quantum mechanics. This is progress in science—finding previous error or incompleteness.
Stanley Benjamin Prusiner is an American neurologist and biochemist. He is the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Prusiner discovered prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens primarily or solely composed of protein. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1994 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for prion research developed by him and his team of experts (David E. Garfin, D. P. Stites, W. J. Hadlow, C. W. Eklund) beginning in the early 1970s.
