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It can be said with complete confidence that any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not enough that a problem should be "interesting" - almost any problem is interesting if it is studied in sufficient depth.

— Peter Medawar Advice to a Young Scientist (1979)

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More quotes by Peter Medawar

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

No virus is known to do good: it has been well said that a virus is "a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein."

A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.

If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.

Karl Popper’s conception of the scientific process is that is realistic – it gives a pretty fair picture of what goes on in real life laboratories.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Peter Medawar (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.