To be,
or not to be

Quotes to ponder about

2024: Changing the world might be a full-time job by itself. - Abhijit Banerjee.

2024: But Alberts says he and his textbook co-authors don’t like to flood students with unknowns, so vaults haven’t made the cut. John Travis.

2024: ... I worry that sometimes people forget this and design their research questions based on their model system when in fact they should think about the larger question first and should not be averse to using more than one model system if needed. I often see colleagues trying hard to ‘sell’ their model organism, which may be justified while defending a grant proposal but is unfair to students; they need to learn about organisms belonging to as many taxa as possible.... I really feel quite strongly that the charges associated with publishing are getting out of control. It is becoming a big business without checks and balances. Many labs in India find it very difficult to raise that kind of money to publish their papers. - Surendra Ghaskadbi

2024: One of my first students and I were discussing an experiment and he said “It won’t work. I don’t want to try it.” My slightly frustrated reply was: “No guts, no glory.” - Anne Ephrussi.

2024: As the three of us frequently discussed and taught our students, you are not there to confirm your own theories, but to seek the truth, even if it means that you need to revisit your previous work. - Jan Vijg & Jan Hoeijmakers.

2023: Biology is a field of science that reveals itself in proportion with the questions asked, funds granted, techniques available, battles fought, conflicts resolved, and time scales possible. - Miłyprzystojniak.

2023: The result is that we are turning the next generation of scientists into excellent experimentalists and “research managers,” rather than into bold scientific thinkers. Baer M et al., 

2023: I realised you can study something that no one else is investigating and could make real discoveries. I couldn't imagine any other job or profession that could offer such a possibility. - Sara Sigismund.

2023: When I was young, insecure, and just starting my scientific career, my teacher once said, “Don't think about science, just do it.” - Makoto Suematsu

2022: In short, be curious and brave, think outside the box, collaborate. - Vladimir Korzh

2020: It is therefore a fundamental contradiction how much we disregard the health of our oceans and forests, where this precious gas is produced and to which we owe our lives. - José López-Barneo & M. Celeste Simon. 

2018: Really the three most important features of a great scientist are courage, determination and creativity. - Agnieszka Chacinska. 

2018: What is interesting in science is that you never know what will happen tomorrow. - Virginijus Siksnys

2017: What I think is that certain subjects reach a certain stage and what they require is someone come and look at them from a completely different point of view. And I'm a great believer in the power of ignorance. I think you can always know too much. I feel one of the things of being an experienced scientist in a subject is it curtails creativity, because you know too much and you know what won't work. And I think what we should be doing is spreading ignorance rather than knowledge, because it's ignorance that allows you to do things. And so I believe that it is people who come from the outside, who have not been entrained into the standard approach, who can see things from a different way. Those I think are the people who will then make the new step. You see, because Gamow didn't know anything about molecular structure, he couldn't even… but he saw these from the point of view of… of a physicist, of a correspondence, which is what physicists dealed with, and he could pose the problem in a form that no biochemists could pose it, because that's not the way they thought.  - Sydney Brenner

2017: Choose a question to which you really want to know the answer, then let that curiosity be your driver. If you don't really care about the question – or the answer to it – you'll struggle to do good science. Then, when designing experiments to address this question, ask yourself: ‘if I do some particular experiment, will the likely results really help me to answer the question?'. If you pick a question that really, really interests you, this should provide you with the motivation to do good science and help you to avoid doing stupid experiments. - Claudio Stern

2014: I did not know what was not known. - Suresh Jesuthasan

2014: Every medical and microbiology textbook at the time stated that the stomach was sterile, so nobody had thought of doing a culture or looking for bacteria with a simple Gram stain, a laboratory technique used to identify species of bacterium. If they had, they would have found H. pylori in five minutes! - Barry Marshall

2013: The bad reaction was the head of my laboratory, who came to my office one day and, smiling sheepishly, put a book on x-ray diffraction on my desk and said, 'Danny, please read this book and you will understand that what you are saying cannot be.' And I told him, you know, I don't need to read this book, I teach at the Technion, and I know this book, and I'm telling you my material is not in the book. He came back a couple of days later and said to me, 'Danny, you are a disgrace to my group. I cannot be with you in the same group.' So I left the group and found another group that adopted a scientific orphan." - Daniel Shechtman. 

2013: Biology turns out, on this reading, to be a good deal more theoretical than physics. However contrary this may be to the party line, we really should not be so surprised. Biology, after all, is a good deal harder than physics. If scientific research is stumbling around in a dark cellar looking for a black cat, then biology is doing so without knowing there is a cat there until one accidentally falls over it. Theory can sometimes conjure up the cat before the accident. Those biologists who have exploited that capability—Delbrück, Fisher, Haldane, Hill, Hodgkin, Huxley, Knudson, Luria, Michaelis, Mendel, Menten, Morgan, and Wright, among the few mentioned here—have lit the cellar for others to follow. The value of theory is often claimed to lie in making predictions or in fitting models to data, both of which are no doubt commendable, but, as the examples here reveal, theory has played a far more valuable role by showing us how to think about entities that lie beyond our grasp. It has helped biologists to see in the dark. - Jeremy Gunawardena

2012: March away from the sound of the guns. - Wilson, E.O. 

2011: But people—biochemists didn't like that. They said, where were the enzymes? How dare you call it a receptor when it isn't in a membrane? People thought receptors were in membranes. - Elwood V. Jensen

2011: At first I was alone against the world, in the end Linus Pauling was alone against the world. - Daniel Shechtman. 

2004: I did not even think about any other option that I would take at the time. I would not take another option, at least at the time. - Liliana Solnica-Krezel

2003: If you find yourself asking “how come no-one knows the answer to that?”, you may have hit on a good project. Don't be afraid of making mistakes, as you will anyway; you can't learn to ride a bike without falling off.... Groundbreaking work may be hard to get into the ‘top’ journals, because it doesn't fit established norms. - Tony Pawson. 

1995: You are only a window through which the people above you, who fund the institute and those below you, who work there, can look at each other. So it is best to keep the window shut and the blinds drawn. - Sydney Brenner

1984: The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge. - Daniel J. Boorstin 

19XX: If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off... no matter what they say. - Barbara McClintock

19XX: This job, regardless of permanent tenure, would certainly kill my vitality. - Barbara McClintock

1973: Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. - Theodosius Dobzhansky

19XX: I am very sorry, but I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them. - Salvador Dali

1914: But in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. - Sir Francis Darwin

1904: Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas. - Maria Skłodowska-Curie

Articles to ponder about

2024: THE VAULT GUY. John Travis. Science. 

2024: Got a Radical Idea at Work? Find a Partner. Roberto Verganti and Paola Bellis. Harvard Business Review. 

2024: How to build a scientific career. Nobel Prize Outreach. 

2023: Interview with Journal of Cell Science Editor Renata Basto. J Cell Sci. 

2023: Make romance your driving force.  Ishitani T. JSCB.

2023: Women in science: Marta Pacia and Aleksandra Rutkowska. NCN.

2023: Redefining tuberculosis: an interview with Lalita Ramakrishnan.  Ramakrishnan, L. Dis Model Mech.

2023: Blind men and an elephant.... Anbalagan, S. Animal Model Exp Med.

2022: Academic cyberbullying. Kostakopoulou, D. & Mahmoudi, M. EClinicalMedicine.

2021: Prof. Zofia Szweykowska-Kulińska. Publikować dobrze! Życie Uniwersyteckie.

2021: Featured Investigators - Karuna Sampath.

2021: Gaslighting in nursing academia: A new or established covert form of bullying? Christensen, M. & Evans-Murray, A. Nurs Forum.

2019: What is the question? Yanai, I & Lercher, M. Genome Biol.

2018: Interview with Theodor Bücher medal awardee Agnieszka Chacinska. FEBS Network.

2016: Close but no Nobel: the scientists who never won. Butler, D. Nature.

2016: The water watchdog. Bernstein, R. Science. 

2016: The unsung heroes of CRISPR. Ledford, H. Nature.

2015: Workplace Bullying and Suicidal Ideation: A 3-Wave Longitudinal Norwegian Study. Am J Public Health.

2014: Q & A: Suresh Jesuthasan. Jesuthasan, S. Curr Biol.

2013: A lifetime of migration. Donovan, P. & Wylie, C. Int J Dev Biol.

2010: Academic mobbing: hidden health hazard at workplace. Khoo, Sb. Malays Fam Physician.

2009: How to choose a good scientific problem. Alon, U. Mol Cell. 

2007: Philosophy of science. The Cha-Cha-Cha theory of scientific discovery. Koshland Jr, D.E.  Science.

2006: What is a good editorial? Singh, A. & Singh, S.  Mens Sana Monogr.

2005: Boris Balinsky: transition from embryology to developmental biology. Korzh, V.  BioEssays.

2004: A Message for Young Child Neurologists.. Kamoshita, S. No To Hattatsu.

2003: Worms and science. An interview with Sydney Brenner...  Brenner, S. EMBO Rep.

2003: Myths in science. Stasiak, A. EMBO Rep. 

2003:Records and Recollections: A New Look at Barbara McClintock, Nobel-Prize-Winning Geneticist. Kass, L.B. Genetics.

2000: FAQs on Academic Freedom.

Talks to ponder about

2024: Rich White on living on the edge cases. Yanai, I & Lercher M. Night Science.

2023: Blind men and an elephant.. Anbalagan, S.

2022: How curiosity driven research resulted in the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Marshall B. GYSS Singapore.

2021: Great Scientists, Great Failures. Vaidya, V. 

2020: Compromising your dreams. Tole, S. ALBA FENS.

2017: A talk with an Israeli Nobelist - Prof. Dan Shechtman.

2017: Realising my lecturers knew nothing. Brenner, S. Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People.

2013: We have to change the culture of science to do better research. Alon, U.  TEDxLausanne.

2012: Advice to young scientists. Wilson, E.O.  TED.

2011: A Conversation with Elwood V. Jensen. Annual Review of Physiol.

2009: The danger of a single story. Adichie, C.N.  TED.

2004: Lilianna Solnica-Krezel interview conducted by William Van Benschoten at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation.