Research Focus Quotes

The major credit I think Jim and I deserve ... is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold. Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene. ... We could not see what the answer was, but we considered it so important that we were determined to think about it long and hard, from any relevant point of view.

I didn't want to become a professor or get tenure or teach or anything. All I wanted to do was get a degree because Louis Leakey said I needed one, which was right, and once I succeeded I could get back to the field.

I don't view myself as a practitioner of a particular skill or method. I'm constantly looking at what's the most interesting problem that I could possibly work on. I really try to figure out what sort of scientist I need to be in order to solve the problem I'm interested in solving.

My father was a physicist, while I am a biogeochemist. I live to study plants, and he has never had more than a generic interest in biology.

When scientists are asked what they are working on, their response is seldom 'Finding the origin of the universe' or 'Seeking to cure cancer.' Usually, they will claim to be tackling a very specific problem - a small piece of the jigsaw that builds up the big picture.

I don't think about a theory of everything when I do my research. And even if we knew the ultimate underlying theory, how are you going to explain the fact that we're sitting here? Solving string theory won't tell us how humanity was born.

We are not particularly interested in the prestige of space, but in the scientific aspects of it.

Lots of people working in cryptography have no deep concern with real application issues. They are trying to discover things clever enough to write papers about.

By that time I was hooked on a career in academic research instead of one in the pharmaceutical industry that I had originally considered in deciding to get a PhD.

The main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialization

Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.

Up to that time I never realized that I possessed any particular gift of discovery, but Lord Rayleigh, whom I always considered as an ideal man of science, had said so and if that was the case, I felt that I should concentrate on some big idea.

I am a medical scientist, not a practical physician.

I have high-tech tastes. If I had $100 million, I would spend it on research equipment rather than a yacht.

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

My life as a working theorist began three months after this preliminary study and background reading, when Oscar gently nudged me toward working on a particular problem.

There are chemists who spend their whole lives trying to find out what's in a lump of sugar. I want to know one thing. What is color?

The great object is to find the theory of the matter [of X-rays] before anyone else, for nearly every professor in Europe is now on the warpath.

Science is about filling in the details.

You don't say to a university professor who is immersed in a particular subject that they should get a life. They are encouraged to enjoy their subject and to pass it on.

I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company.

Much of contemporary science is really the length and shadow of the technology we apply.

One emphasis of my research has been on the question of how people spend their time. Time is the ultimate finite resource, or course, so the question of how people spend it would seem to be important.

The short-term vision is: I research on something which I can use tomorrow, and for some politicians it is even better if it's today. But if you do this, you can only do targeted research. If you only do targeted research, you lose the side-routes.

Investigations during the last few decades have brought hydrogen instead of carbon, and instead of CO2 water, the mother of all life, into the foreground.