Groundbreaking Research Quotes

If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.

Decoding the human genome is the most significant undertaking that we have mounted so far in an organized way in all of science. I believe that reading our blueprints, cataloguing our own instruction book, will be judged by history as more significant than even splitting the atom or going to the moon.

Groundbreaking research involves a high level of risk.

If what we are doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it's probably not transformative enough

This is the kind of discovery that resonates.

Unprecedented opportunities for new scientific experience ...

No-one really thought of fission before its discovery.

Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.

There's a tremendous amount of work building the apparatus, getting the experiment to work. But sitting there late at night in the lab, and knowing light is going at bicycle speed, and that nobody in the history of mankind has ever been here before - that is mind-boggling. It's worth everything.

No one has been a greater botanist or zoologist. No one has written more books, more correctly, more methodically, from personal experience. No one has more completely changed a whole science and started a new epoch.

The year 1896 ... marked the beginning of what has been aptly termed the heroic age of Physical Science. Never before in the history of physics has there been witnessed such a period of intense activity when discoveries of fundamental importance have followed one another with such bewildering rapidity.

Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge. It is in the darker. It is in the darker regions of science that great men are recognized; they are marked by ideas which light up phenomena hitherto obscure and carry science forward.

Intellectual curiosity drove Einstein to some of the world's most important discoveries.

I feel unbelievably honored to be, you know, with Marie Curie and Goeppert Mayer. It's like, how can I be in the same breath as those three?

It can be said with complete confidence that any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not enough that a problem should be "interesting".

I went to start the first Ethiopian-led project in paleoanthropology, ever. Doing that was not easy.

I know my theories and findings are hard for you to accept because they are so original and extraordinary.

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.

Science reserves the highest reward for those of you who disprove our most cherished beliefs. At any moment someone from any walk of life could come forward and be responsible for a complete revision of our view of everything.

Most of the crackpot papers which are submitted to The Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published. When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer himself it will be only half-understood; to everybody else it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.

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

The fact that this radiation is so penetrating - nothing stops it - makes it so you can look for things that you have never seen before, and you can look at things you know in a way that's new. That is really the big step forward.

It is a remarkable honor to receive a Nobel Prize, because it not only recognizes discoveries, but also their usefulness to the advancement of fundamental science.

There's nothing in this world like being the first to discover some fundamental fact of nature. It's profoundly satisfying.

I didn't invent forensic science and medicine. I just was one of the first people to recognize how interesting it is.