4 quotes
The pamphlet teaches the skills that skills that Benzer’s former labmates would now need to learn, including propaganda, “that branch of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.”
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (1999)
One test of a true clock is its ability to keep time through a wide range of temperatures. A clock that speeds up in hot weather and slows down in cold weather is not a clock, although it may make a good thermometer.
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (1999)
All three spoke in the kind of down-home, common-as-flies style that is the lingua franca of great scientists, conveying a contempt for pretension, a contempt for cant, a delight in common sense, combined with uncommon curiosity about what is really there.
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (1999)
“Molecular biology has no history for the young scientist,” one of the old guard declared not long ago.
Sydney Brenner qualified that: “I hold the somewhat weaker view that history does exist for the young, but is divided into two epochs: the past two years, and everything that went before.”
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (1999)