The advance in scientific research and its ever widening sphere stirs the hope in us that the microbes, those of the soul as well as of the body, will gradually disappear, and that the only war humanity will wage in the future will be one against these microbes.

Quoted in Selman A. Waksman, Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes in 1952, Nobel banquet speech for award received in 1952, Nobel Foundation. Stockholm, Sweden. 1953