Research Direction Quotes

One of my motivations to become a blood specialist was to study malaria in red blood cells. But in science, you discover something and you want to go this way, but your work goes that way.

In my lab, we are constantly asking, 'What's the utility of this pure science that we're doing? Let's nudge it a little bit in a direction where people can connect to it and have some fun and/or help some very serious problems they have.'

Empirical explorations ultimately change our understanding of which questions are important and fruitful and which are not.

NASA works for the White House. There are many at NASA that wish they were building a modern replacement for the Shuttle. However, they had marching orders to instead work on other things, some of which should have no place in a research organization.

As we returned to Argentina, I started seriously to work towards a doctoral degree under the direction of Professor Stoppani, the Professor of Biochemistry at the Medical School.

I tend to change research direction every few years or so.

Who does science determines what science gets done.

Empirical sciences prosecuted purely for their own sake, and without philosophic tendency are like a face without eyes.

With science it's very important not to go down the wrong path, but the wrong path in science is a path you go down where everything you learn is already known. So you need to steer around the obvious.

Basic research is very useful, but it should be more geared toward application than it was before.

All the Congressmen who know nothing about the subject are telling the scientists how to do their research and what kinds to do.

My research is like my feeling directed towards what is the principal value in the life, the poetry.

A problem of future research is to clarify how young children learn what type of social comparative information is most useful for efficacy evaluation

IBM isn't investing billions of dollars every year into research and development - and winning more patents than our top 10 competitors combined for more than a decade - as an academic exercise. But research is now being driven much more by what people need rather than just by what is possible.

About 1960, it became clear that it was best for me to bring the experimental part of my research program to a close - there was too much to do on the theoretical aspects - and I began the process of winding down the experiments.

In 1998, I set up and directed a research group at the Nanotechnology Institute newly created in the Research Center of Karlsruhe. This allowed to offer to former post-doctoral coworkers the opportunity to develop and to progressively set up independent research activities in nanoscience and nanotechnology.

While a lab Director can get done the things that he regards as important, he has the more important job of bringing out the best ideas of the broader scientific community.

I think there is value in having practising scientists as leaders of research institutions.

Even a brilliant research scientist can waste his or her efforts, in [Stephan Hawking's] case on theoretically impossible lines of research, if he or she rejects clear evidence pointing to God.

The valid research for the future is on the inner side, on the spiritual side.

I've seen people spend days, if not months, researching and gathering data, but only at the end did they finally figure out what they were really looking for; then they have to redo a lot of stuff. If after a day or so you force yourself to put together your tentative conclusions, then you'll have guidance for the rest of your research.

A lot of times, the internal R&D doesn't pan out. You go down one route, you find that it doesn't work the way you planned, and you have to switch and go down another one.

Modern physics has changed nothing in the great classical disciplines of, for instance, mechanics, optics, and heat. Only the conception of hitherto unexplored regions, formed prematurely from a knowledge of only certain parts of the world, has undergone a decisive transformation. This conception, however, is always decisive for the future course of research.

Instead of studying what biology has already made, we have to imagine what biology could make. You can say, 'Oh, I want a cure for cancer,' but that doesn't tell you what evolutionary pathway will take you from here to there. What are the intermediate steps?

If you are funding researchers to look primarily for pathology, not surprisingly, that is what they are going to find and report on.