Biochemist

🇫🇷Louis Pasteur

Science

1904–1989

"S’il est terrifiant de penser que la vie puisse être à la merci de la multiplication de ces infiniment petits, il est consolant aussi d’espérer que la science ne restera pas toujours impuissante devant de tels ennemis."

"If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he must be prepared to do is give his life for the president's."

🇺🇸James Watson

Science

1928–2025

"I turned against the left wing because they don't like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system."

Isaac Asimov

Science

1920–1992

"It is well-known that the friend of a conqueror is but the last victim."

🇮🇱Yeshayahu Leibowitz

Science

Neo-Kantianism

1903–1994

"Only a religion addressed to life's prose, a religion of the dull routine of daily activity, is worthy of the name."

🇦🇹Max Perutz

Science

1914–2002

"Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object?"

🇬🇧Aaron Klug

Science

1926–2018

"People who get Nobel prizes aren't necessarily the most imaginative of people. People who sometimes find a system, develop a system, do very useful work."

🇺🇸Rita Levi-Montalcini

Science

1909–2012

"She had this feeling for what was happening biologically. She was an intuitive observer, and she saw that something was making these nerve connections grow and was determined to find out what it was."

"The overriding supremacy of the myth has created a widespread illusion that the theory of evolution was all but proved one hundred years ago . . . Nothing could be further from the truth."

🇺🇸Joseph Goldstein

Philosophy

b. 1940

"The more we can be with our own difficulty, our own pain, the easier it is to be with the pain and difficulties of others."

🇺🇸Gertrude B. Elion

Science

1918–1999

"I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of stomach cancer. I decided that nobody should suffer that much."

🇬🇧Rosalind Franklin

Science

1920–1958

"What’s the use of doing all this work if we don't get some fun out of this?"

🇺🇸Craig Venter

Science

b. 1946

"Moving forward in science is as much unwinding the distorted thinking of the past as it is putting a clearer idea on the table."

🇬🇧Francis Crick

Literature

1916–2004

"Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene."

🇨🇭Gottfried Schatz

Science

1936–2015

"I am tired of hearing that the DNA in my cells nucleus is the complete blueprint of what is, or could be, me. There is more to me than that. The sequence of my nuclear DNA is not "My Genome."

🇺🇸Walter Gilbert

Science

1932–1994

"is absolutely correct in saying that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by the AIDS virus. And he is absolutely correct that the virus cultured in the laboratory may not be the cause of AIDS."

🇬🇧Ernst Chain

Science

1906–1979

"The future of medicine is safe in your hands."

🇺🇸Robert Gallo

Medicine

b. 1937

"Appropriating her work wasn’t the worst of it. This delayed the development of testing and spread the HIV epidemic through the world, killing millions."

"Based on the virus genome and properties, there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus."

🇩🇪Bernard Katz

Medicine

1911–2003

"Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme."

🇺🇸George Gamow

Science

1904–1968

"I decided to get Ph.D. in experimental physics because experimental physicists have their own room in the Institute where they can hang their coat, whereas theoretical physicists have to hang their coat at the entrance."

🇬🇧James Lovelock

Science

1919–2022

"Bacteria... have been here for three and a half billion years, and without them we have no chance whatsoever of survival. Humans are something very recent, like the froth on top of a glass of beer."

Christian de Duve

Science

1917–2013

"It is as though a puzzle could be put together simply by shaking its pieces."

🇺🇸Michael Behe

Science

b. 1952

"In private many scientists admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life. . . . Darwin never imagined the exquisitely profound complexity that exists even at the most basic levels of life."

"All living organisms fall into one of three large groups that define three branches of evolution from a common progenitor."

🇺🇸Mary Ruwart

Literature

b. 1949

"Our greatest polluter is the government , not corporate America. Putting government in charge of protecting the environment is like asking the fox to guard the hen house."

🇺🇸Linus Pauling

Science

atheism

1901–1994

"If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away."

🇺🇸Julia Serano

Literature

b. 1967

"Once a person acknowledges that they possess some form of privilege, they are more likely to accept the reality that they are not in any way objective about the form of marginalization in question"

🇬🇧Paul Nurse

Medicine

b. 1949

"Ever since Sir Isaac Newton's times, scientists have worked in the same sort of way:"

🇮🇱Israel Shahak

Social Activism

1933–2001

"That is a Nazi expression. The Nazis called Germans who defended Jewish rights self-hating Germans."

🇺🇸Kary Mullis

Science

1944–2019

"Years from now, people will find our acceptance of the HIV theory of AIDS as silly as we find those who excommunicated Galileo."

🇺🇸Frank Westheimer

Science

1912–2007

"A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library."

🇺🇸Bernard Brodie (military strategist)

Military

1910–1978

"There is no other science where judgements are tested in blood and answered in the servitude of the defeated, where the acknowledged authority is the leader who has won or who instills confidence that he can win."

🇺🇸Duane Gish

Science

1921–2013

"Neither evolution nor creation qualifies as a scientific theory."

🇬🇧Dorothy Hodgkin

Science

1910–1994

"Would it not be better if one could really 'see' whether molecules...were just as experiments suggested?"

🇺🇸Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Science

b. 1952

"In the current debate about immigration, it is worth noting that this award is yet another example of the numerous contributions that immigrants make to British society."