Stanley B. Prusiner Quotes

There is some truth to the idea that, in the fields of science, individual contributions of great significance are possible.

Basic research is to work at the very edge, the very border of, of knowledge, and move that border forward. You look and look for new secrets, and you don't know where it's going to lead you.

Usually the first problems you solve with the new paradigm are the ones that were unsolvable with the old paradigm.

When thinking through who to bring together to generate new ideas, it is more effective to combine specialists from very different and unrelated disciplines rather than a variety of people with different skills sets in the same field.

I've always challenged myself and the people who work with me to take new approaches to traditional business challenges, to push the envelope and constantly ask whether our sacred cows are still producing great milk.

None of the great discoveries was made by a 'specialist' or a 'researcher'.

I want something completely new and different to happen, and lots of it. Stuff that makes us change the way we think about a market or the world. Something that inspires a new generation of crazy startups doing crazy things.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

Changing the game is a mindset.

The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.

Science is the best idea humans have ever had. The more people who embrace that idea, the better.

Science is a wonderful discipline, to which we are deeply indebted.

The credit of advancing science has always been due to individuals and never to the age.

I've always been controversial because I offer new ideas. For me to be controversial, I think this is positive.

To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.

Entrepreneurs almost always have to step out of existing institutions that embody old ways of doing things to build their vision.

The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them.

To me, unconventional thinking is approaching a problem and asking, 'Why not? Why can't something be done?' If someone can't give me a good reason why you can't do something, I find a way to do it.

From all this it follows what the general character of the problem of the development of a body of scientific knowledge is, in so far as it depends on elements internal to science itself.

If you're an adult and you choose not to believe in science, fine, but please don't prevent your children from learning about it and letting them draw their own conclusions.

Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

Indeed science alone may perhaps be sterile when pursued without an understanding of the world in which scientific knowledge is created and in which the fruits of science are used.

I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago.

I'm big on the importance of science, particularly right now at this point in time when there's sort of a systematic rejection of science by a lot of people in America.

Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.