Walter Gilbert Quotes

22 quotes in 279 categories

• The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.
• Here is a human being; it's me!
• The community as a whole doesn't listen patiently to critics who adopt alternative viewpoints. Although the great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through…
• Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.
• Error is far more common than fraud which probably comprises 1 percent or a tenth of a percent of the literature.
• Early on, it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise, even if what you're writing about is not…
• Everyone wants a hand in the outcome, a piece of the knowledge.
• I have the same sense of the power and virtue of knowledge that some people get from a religious background.
• Science doesn't in the slightest depend on trust. It depends completely on the belief that you can demonstrate something for yourself.
• The best project is one that asks a novel question.
• The interaction of the variation in our genes is what's responsible for lots of our attributes and vigor.
• Today we try to identify a gene and then study its properties.
• We haven't been able yet to determine in terms of genes what makes a human being a human and not another mammal.
• We know specific genes are turned on in specific cells, but we don't know to what extent this happens.
• Why do we do basic research? To learn about ourselves.
• By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and…
• In 15 years we'll have all the sequence, a list of the genes everyone has in common and those that differ among people. We know…
• Scientists tend to be skeptical, but the weakness of the community of science is that it tends to move into preformed establishment modes that say…
• Biology will tell you a lot of things, but there are many that it can not explain and you need to look at physics instead.
• We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.

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