 Although I am a public figure, I'm still a little shy. I don't think my own personality is important. I prefer to keep some small dosage of privacy. |
| I have many shortcomings. I feel very lucky to have been able to have what I've had. |
| To have the recognition of your colleagues is great. The public attention is a mixed blessing. |
| I don't believe anybody can really grasp everything that's even in one textbook. |
| I got my Nobel Prize for my lab work. |
| I think we have to believe we are here for some purpose, and I know there are many cynics who will deny it, but they don't live as if they deny it. |
| A Swedish newspaper reporter called and said, You've been awarded the Prize. I was quite sure it was a practical joke. |
| If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing. |
| When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells. |
| I wish I had a talent for dropping things as well as taking on new ones. It gets to be quite a clutter after a while. |
| I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room. |
| If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that. |
| Everybody has to learn for the first time. |
| I'm not easily inhibited by the fact that I don't know something about a subject. It doesn't stop me from dabbling in it. |
| I started on the use of the Internet for scientific communication. Our research group was one of the very first to make really systematic use of it as a way of managing research projects. |
| As soon as you go into any biological process in any real detail, you discover it's open-ended in terms of what needs to be found out about it. |
| So many of the things I've predicted were technologies that were just sitting right in front of us. |
| Try hard to find out what you're good at and what your passions are, and where the two converge, and build your life around that. |
| I'd like to put in a vote for the intrinsic fascination of science. |
| I certainly saw science as a kind of calling, and one with as much legitimacy as a religious calling. |
