Research Priority Quotes

If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about.

You have no time to do the science if you're talking to the media.

NASA needs to focus on the things that are really important and that we do not know how to do. The agency is a pioneering force, and that is where its competitive advantage lies.

Migration has been politicized before it has been analyzed.

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.

It is not necessarily true that expensive experiments are not worthwhile doing but there are plenty of rather cheap experiments which are certainly worth doing.

Sickle cell does not have the priority in this country that it had in the 1960s, when I started working on it. Congress has been cutting everything that wasn't nailed down.

The companies that can afford to do basic research (and can't afford not to) are ones that dominate their markets. … It's cheap insurance, since failing to do basic research guarantees that the next major advance will be owned by someone else.

Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science.

If you don't invest in basic research at some stage you start losing the basis of applied research.