American Scientist Quotations

All anyone asks for is a chance to work with pride.

The egg of every species of animal or plant carries a definite number of bodies called chromosomes. The sperm carries the same number. Consequently, when the sperm unites with the egg, the fertilized egg will contain the double number of chromosomes.

You are a member of the British royal family. We are never tired, and we all love hospitals.

This fact immediately suggested a singular event - that at some time in the distant past the universe began expanding from an extremely small size. To many people this inference was loaded with overtones of a supernatural event - the creation, the beginning of the universe.

There's my education in computers, right there; this is the whole thing, everything I took out of a book.

In my opinion, no single design is apt to be optimal for everyone.

I performed adequately at school, but in comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the highest cumulative average for our high school, my performance was decidedly mediocre.

Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior requires only reflex action.

And, I think that is actually appropriate because I'm really not the world's best programmer, I think it's a good thing that I'm not touching the code.

We do not discuss the anatomical, physiological, and mental characteristics of man considered as an individual; but we are interested in the diversity of these traits in groups of men found in different geographical areas and in different social classes.

The private sector is motivated by profit and efficiency and the US government often is not.

I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes.

When I die India will be found engraved on my heart.

In general we are least aware of what our minds do best.

Japan is the only country in the world which suffered from the scourge of nuclear weapons.

On vacation, I totally unplug. I don't bring a laptop with me.

If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.

The atmosphere is much too near for dreams. It forces us to action. It is close to us. We are in it and of it. It rouses us both to study and to do. We must know its moods and also its motive forces.

The Nobel Prize, so long regarded in our science as the highest reward a man's work can earn, must bring to its recipient a most solemn sense of his debt to his fellow scientists and those of the past.

For each chromosome contributed by the sperm there is a corresponding chromosome contributed by the egg, there are two chromosomes of each kind, which together constitute a pair.

You know more than you think you do.

I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, "What are you?

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.

It is my strong hope that an environment will be created in which both of our countries can cooperate for the realization of a world without nuclear weapons.

We expert teachers know that motivation and emotional impact are what matter.

What I'm thinking about more and more these days is simply the importance of transparency, and Jefferson's saying that he'd rather have a free press without a government than a government without a free press.

I can come off as pretty arrogant, but it's because I know I'm right. I'm very, very good at writing protocols. I've accomplished more working on my own than I ever did as part of a team.

When things don't work well in the bedroom, they don't work well in the living room either.

Not as a demonstrated natural law, but as a working hypothesis.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

It might seem unfair to reward a person for having so much pleasure over the years, asking the maize plant to solve specific problems and then watching its responses.

Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.

Yet the effort to inform the public also encouraged responsible public discussion that succeeded in developing a consensus for the measured approach that many scientists supported.

My parents were in short street, so they had to go abroad to economize.

It is not easy to be a pioneer - but oh, it is fascinating! I would not trade one moment, even the worst moment, for all the riches in the world.

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.

One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.

Standardization of our educational systems is apt to stamp out individualism and defeat the very ends of education by leveling the product down rather than up.

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.

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.

When immortality becomes for us no longer a matter of academic discussion, but the most vital of all questions; we shall find our comfort where so many before us have found it, in the ancient words.

I have started that which the country will not willingly let die.

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.

In other words, we are interested in the anatomical and mental characteristics of men living under the same biological, geographical, and social environment, and as determined by their past.

There are lots of other issues in policy including the stem cell issue.

None of these devices address that women keep track of many people's lives, not just their own.

The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.

It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

User-centered design means working with your users all throughout the project.

For me, what's a more important question is how we get at least the option of more diverse experiences in this media.

Stanley Kubrick knew we had good graphics around MIT and came to my lab to find out how to do it. We had some really good stuff. I was very impressed with Kubrick; he knew all the graphics work I had ever heard of, and probably more.

When I put my mind to it I can be a megalomaniac.

Not so the scientist. The very essence of his life is the service of truth.

For, behind the scenes, halfway around the world in Mexico, were two decades of aggressive research on wheat that not only enabled Mexico to become self-sufficient with respect to wheat production but also paved the way to rapid increase in its production in other countries.

The Sims is kind of an interesting case because we had all these expansion packs. We were able to incrementally add on and explore without invading the core dynamic or the core game play.

This idea was also brought out very clearly by Wallace, who emphasized that apparently reasonable activities of man might very well have developed without an actual application of reasoning.

The geographical isolation and lack of television made world happenings and problems seem remote.

We were suddenly faced with the necessity of training a lot of young men in the art of navigation.

Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability - they should go hand in hand.

But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us.

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.

What is the source of all this trouble? I'm saying that the source is basically in thought. Many people would think that such a statement is crazy, because thought is the one thing we have with which to solve our problems. That's part of our tradition.

Yet it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems with is the source of our problems. It's like going to the doctor and having him make you ill. In fact, in 20% of medical cases we do apparently have that going on. But in the case of thought, its far over 20%.

Nevertheless, the number of farmers, small as well as large, who are adopting the new seeds and new technology is increasing very rapidly, and the increase in numbers during the past three years has been phenomenal.

But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked.

Thought has been constantly evolving and we can't say when that system began.

This led to the discovery that long chain fatty acids would remarkably stabilize serum albumin to heat denaturation, and would even reverse the denaturation by heat or concentrated urea solutions.

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.

From the business point of view - not to overstate it - intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.

The second thing for me, probably a few clicks down, is the idea that The Sims smoothly age and have different concerns and motivations and needs at different age ranges.

A big ethical question is what happens after people stop using the device. Does it degrade the environment? Could it have been designed so it would actually be good for the environment?

The wave of new productive enterprises would provide opportunities to remedy the unjust distribution of environmental hazards among economic classes and racial and ethnic communities.

The question of how the eye works - that is, what happens when a photon of light first impinges on the retina - simply could not be answered at that time.

As for all those mistakes I make - they are on purpose - to teach you how to deal with them.

I've been looking at the iPod- the Apple iPod. One of the interesting things about the iPod, one of the things that people love most about it is not the technology; it's the box it comes in.

The weapons were conceived and created by a small band of physicists and chemists; they remain a cataclysmic threat to the whole of human society and the natural environment.

When a system is stable, telling the worker about mistakes is only tampering.

Any manager can do well in an expanding market.

The emphasis should be on why we do a job.

Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.

You can not define being exactly on time.

It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

When we get the final hardware, the performance is just going to skyrocket.

We're going to do something that's really unprecedented in the industry by launching the console in all three major markets for the same holiday. It's never been done before.

We're experimenting with new ideas we can put into it, which makes it hard for me to say exactly when we will be done with them.

Therefore it would be wrong and misleading to break it up into my thought, your thought, my feelings, these feelings, those feelings.

The production and consumption of genetically engineered food plants are realities although their dissemination has been limited.

When the temperature is freezing, it's a bit hard on your fingers, but I was interested in putting down what I saw. And that's what paid off.

Leaders of the future will have to be visionary and be able to bring people in - real communicators. These are things that women bring to leadership and executive positions, and it's going to be incredibly valuable and incredibly in demand.

Minnesota has generally competent and honest public officials, good support of the schools and cultural amenities, and an excellent state university.

Modern democracy was no doubt the most wholesome and needed reaction against the abuses of absolutism and of a selfish, often corrupt, bureaucracy.

My initial interest, just prior to my work on cytokines, was on cell-mediated immunity and delayed hypersensitivity, mostly with respect to the cells that populated these reactions.

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right.

Right now in California we gain 40,000 new acres of desert every year, with all the building and the people coming in... housing going up like crazy.

My scientific interests throughout my undergraduate days were directed to cell biology and especially the mysteries of embryonic development.

On the Apache server the core team duties are distributed among 20 or so people, but only six to eight are active at any point in time.

One of the most amazing developments in the history of biology.

One of the problems that we have as American journalists is that we bring the American cultural baggage with us and we plop it down and it follows us around and that's just a fact of life.

I was posted to China in the summer of 1988, which was the greatest time ever, I think, to have been in China.