John Sulston Quotes

Networked science has the potential to speed up dramatically the rate of discovery across all of science.

Science is an international enterprise where discoveries in one part of the world are useful in other parts.

The development of science is basically a social phenomenon, dependent on hard work and mutual support of many scientists and on the societies in which they live.

Maybe we could think of science as being like a nuclear chain reaction in which people and ideas bounce off each other, and if critical mass is reached, a new field is formed.

Our work on C. elegans emphasized the benefits of sharing large amounts of information. We took a global approach to discover the mechanisms that led to the development of the worm.

The fact is that proprietary databases don't work for such basic and broadly needed information as the sequence of the human genome.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics - greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

Most achievements in science are to a certain degree group efforts.

A National Database on Autism Research is fostering sharing of data and collaborations. Scientists are also making great strides at the interface of biology and engineering with new technologies that are laying the groundwork for future advances.

Our understanding of the human brain can be dramatically accelerated if we collect and share research data on an exponentially wider scale.

Science extends an invitation to all nations.

Science is a we, not an I. We are so used to star athletes, star entertainers, star politicians, but that is not science.

Secrecy in science does not work. Withholding information does more damage to us than to our competitors.

Public sharing is an important part of science.

The pace at which fundamental discoveries of basic science are being uncovered is accelerating, as is the speed at which medical practice is being transformed by these inventions.

Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time.

If this [the Mysterium cosmographicum] is published, others will perhaps make discoveries I might have reserved for myself. But we are all ephemeral creatures (and none more so than I). I have, therefore, for the Glory of God, who wants to be recognized from the book of Nature, that these things may be published as quickly as possible. The more others build on my work the happier I shall be.

Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers. Further, it is truly international in scope. Science is a collaborative effort. The combined results of several people working together is often much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone.

The progression of physical science is much more connected with your prosperity than is usually imagined. You owe to experimental philosophy some of the most important and peculiar of your advantages. It is not by foreign conquests chiefly that you are become great, but by a conquest of nature in your own country.

The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.

Furnished as all Europe now is with Academies of Science, with nice instruments and the spirit of experiment, the progress of human knowledge will be rapid and discoveries made of which we have at present no conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence.

Moreover, the works already known are due to chance and experiment rather than to sciences; for the sciences we now possess are merely systems for the nice ordering and setting forth of things already invented; not methods of invention or directions for new works.

Scientific progress consists in the development of new concepts.