Randy Schekman Quotes

In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.

It appears that Wall Street is not acting as a force for economic expansion, providing access to capital for companies that make things. Rather, it seems, Wall Street is using government bailouts to lever up.

Second of all, I don't think Wall Street is doing what it's supposed to be doing, even after the shameful performance of the last two years. They're are not allocating capital.

Barring some national security concern, I see no valid reason to keep peer-reviewed research from the public. To be clear, by 'peer review,' I mean scientific review and not a political filter.

Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong.

The money has to be deferred with what they call "clawback," which means they can get it back if I lose it all. So that guy making ten million a year selling credit default swaps, if we're going to keep five million of it in escrow for ten years, and with the right to go back and get it, if he starts losing money, then we're going to give people the right incentives not too take so much risk.

All market response results from a reduction of uncertainty.

You want banks to take some risk, but intelligent risk.

By the 1890s, the leading Wall Street bankers were becoming increasingly disgruntled with their own creation, the National Banking System... while the banking system was partially centralized under their leadership, it was not centralized enough.

Growth requires risk-taking. If you want to dampen risk and make sure you never have a problem, you do so, but that also will have an effect on growth. This is a decision that doesn't necessarily belong to financial institutions. It belongs to regulators and legislators who represent the body politic.

If you want better behavior from bankers, then make their financial incentives more like those in the hedge-fund world - where managers have 'skin in the game,' and their net worth is tied to their long-term performance.

Maybe we should shut Wall Street down for 24 hours, see how everybody who blames Wall Street for everything likes that. Maybe we should shut energy down for 24 hours, see how people like that.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

The financial sector is vital to the economy. A well-functioning financial sector promotes job creation, innovation, and inclusive economic growth.

I can tell you, because I serve on so many nonprofit boards - where half of us are academics and half of us are from Wall Street - that there's no CEO who understands at all a derivative. All they know is that somebody tells them in their organization, 'We've got a wonderful profit center.'

What we have to find is the right level of regulation of our financial system so that it has the incentive to invest in things, but at the same time, it is sufficiently regulated so it can't get in the kind of trouble that we have seen in the past and we have seen recently.

No matter how the financial system is set up, no matter what the economic system is, as long as you have people, you're going to have financial crises; you're going to have bubbles that manifest themselves in the financial system.

Public sharing is an important part of science.

I perceive Sci-Hub as a practical side of my research.

The better side of Wall Street is when it is acting as an efficient mechanism of capital formation and capital flow, which helps businesses invest.

What I immediately recognized about Wall Street in 1983 was that it was a continuation of my career in theater. Wall Street is a big theater, and it's all illusions.

I'm on the pro-science side of the Republican Party.

Elsevier operates by racket: if you do not send money, you will not read any papers. On my website, any person can read as many papers as they want for free, and sending donations is their free will. Why Elsevier cannot work like this, I wonder?

We survived for hundreds of years under the old banking structure. You'd have clearing banks, then merchant banks doing the racy stuff, and then building societies where you'd join a waiting list for a mortgage. But then banks started buying stockbrokers, doing mortgages, and you ended up with these big banking groups doing everything.