Biologist Quotes

Louis Pasteur

Richard Dawkins

Alexander Fleming

Rachel Carson

James Dewey Watson

Thomas Henry Huxley

Élie Metchnikoff

Science should not concern itself in any way with the philosophical consequences of its discoveries.

It seems likely that in the next few years a combination of antibiotics with different antibacterial spectra will furnish a "cribrum therapeuticum " from which fewer and fewer infecting bacteria will escape.

Alexander Fleming

As biomedical research continues to provide us with greater understanding and with powerful new tools, the scientific community has, I think, a dual responsibility. One is to push forward the frontiers to make medical advances possible, to understand what cancer is, to develop new ways of treating cancer, to prevent heart disease, and to develop ways of preventing, ultimately, disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and depression. But science also has a second responsibility to society, which is to point out what we need to be concerned about as a society and to bring to bear humane, balanced, and thoughtful ways of dealing with the advances that come from biomedical research. Scientists need to speak to these issues.

W. Maxwell Cowan

"Every single new idea in chemistry has come not from the minds of chemists but from nature...

Mr. S. had a letter to Brigham Young, and took us to interview him, horrid old wretch! My hand felt dirty for a week after shaking hands with him.

If the wolf is to survive, the wolf haters must be outnumbered. They must be outshouted, out financed, and out voted. Their narrow and biased attitude must be outweighed by an attitude based on an understanding of natural processes.

When laughing children chase after fireflies, they are not pursuing beetles but catching wonder. When wonder matures, it peels back experience to seek deeper layers of marvel below. This is science's highest purpose.

David G. Haskell

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant.

Martin A. Schwartz

The modern research laboratory can be a large and complicated social organism.

J. Michael Bishop

As I crawled out of the abyss of combat and over the rail of the Sea Runner, I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As Wilfred Owen's poem "Insensibility" puts it so well, those who feel most of others suffer most in war.

The study of adaptation is not an optional preoccupation with fascinating fragments of natural history, it is the core of biological study.

Colin Pittendrigh

In their exploration of the submicroscopic world of atomic nuclei, physicists are like men groping in a dark cave with a flashlight that goes on for only an instant and each time lights only a tiny corner of the cave.

Donald A. Glaser

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.

Michael E. Soulé

Find out what really fascinates you and follow that. Almost anything in nature, if you follow it, you will find a scientific problem. That is a better way to do it than following fads, because what is fashionable today may have been solved or fallen out of fashion once you have become a working scientist.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

The term Invertebrata is also a mere collective name; it is employed to designate all animals which do not belong to the phylum Vertebrata. Like the name Metazoa its convenience in promoting terseness of expression is its only justification.

Ernest MacBride

Evolution, a fact rather than mere hypothesis, is the central unifying concept in biology. By extension it affects almost all other fields of knowledge and thought and must be considered one of the most influential concepts in Western thought.

Douglas J. Futuyma

When I went from academia to a company, they don't care how many committees you are on, how many papers you have. What counts is that you have a product that has an effect. The ego is wiped out. It is so much better.

Katalin Karikó

Cognition modifies the knower so as to adapt him harmoniously to his acquired knowledge.

Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.

The separation of the laws of nature among the different sciences is a human conceit; nature itself is an integrated whole.

Like the resource it seeks to protect, wildlife conservation must be dynamic, changing as conditions change, seeking always to become more effective.

I'm a biologist who has been interested in the biological roots of cognitive phenomena

Francisco Varela

The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game.

If I had any advice to [give] you it is just this: love science but do not worship it. Put science in its proper place, ranking it along with philosophy and history, music and religion, literature and art. If I had my life to live again (Darwin says), I would make it a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

Richard M. Eakin