Daniel Nathans Quotes

Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave.

I wanted to be a scientist. My undergraduate degree is in biology, and I really did think I might go off and be some kind of a lady Darwin someplace. It turned out that I'm really awful at science and that I have no gift for actually doing science myself. But I'm very interested in others who practice science and in the stories of science.

I guess it's inevitable that I would become somebody who would write about scientists.

People have asked me whether I have a science background. No, but I have a great curiosity about the kinds of things we do on 'Discover.'

I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.

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.

A scientist is an unlikely character to put at the center of a movie.

Ever since I was a kid, I've had an enormous interest in the sciences - everything from quantum physics to anthropology.

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

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.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Janet Landis came to work in my group in the summer of 1957 when our first bubble-chamber was churning out its earliest pictures.

I was invited to join the newly established Central Chemical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1954 and was able to establish a small research group in organic chemistry, housed in temporary laboratories of an industrial research institute.

In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.

Science is not addressed to poets.

As a boy, it was clear that my inclinations were toward the physical sciences. Mathematics, mechanics, and chemistry were among the fields that gave me a special satisfaction.

I am a caricature of what British science is about in the way I work.

The people who work in the scientific field, they need help to convey what it's about.

Science was something that really caught my attention. It was something I really could sink my teeth into.

I knew I wanted to be a scientist. Which kind of scientist was the question.

I always wanted to be a scientist, I always thought I'd be a scientist, that was the narrative I was carrying around. I worked in a neuroscience lab as an undergraduate and then after, almost five years in total, but I realized I just wasn't good at science. I didn't have the discipline for it.

A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.

I was always very curious about what a scientist's life was like when I was young. Of course, when I was young, you didn't have very many opportunities to find out with no web, TV. I was very lucky: I was born in the city of Chicago and went to the University of Chicago where I actually saw things.

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.

My dream was to be a 'scientist' even before I knew what a scientist did.