Chemists From The United States

"Te reaction types used for functional group exchanges are collected into seven traditional categories [Acid-base reactions, Substitution reactions, Elimination reactions, Addition reactions, Nucleophilic acyl addition, Oxidation reactions, Reduction reactions]."

"A. No matter what you do, you're always hearing something."

"The misunderstandings have seemed to come from comparing fluxus with movements or groups whose individuals ‘have had some principle in common, or an agreed-upon program. In fluxus there has never been any attempt to agree on aims or methods; individuals with something unnameable in common have simply naturally coalesced to publish and perform their work. Perhaps this common something is a feeling that the bounds of art are much wider than they have conventionally seemed, or that art and certain long-established bounds are no longer very useful. At any rate, individuals in europe, the us, and japan have discovered each other’s work and found it nourishing (or something) and have grown objects and events which are original, and often uncategorizable, in a strange new way."

"My work is a complex product of a personality continuous with all of nature, and one making progressively better-integrated efforts to structure experience on all levels.... My art is the result of a deeply personal, infinitely complex, and still essentially mysterious, exploration of experience. No words will ever touch it."

"fluxus is the “event” according to george brecht:"

"Part of the charm of synthetic organic chemistry derives from the vastness of the intellectual landscape along several dimensions. First, there is the almost infinite variety and number of possible target structures that lurk in the darkness waiting to be made. Then, there is the vast body of organic reactions that serve to transform one substance into another, now so large in number as to be beyond credibility to a non-chemist. There is the staggering range of reagents, reaction conditions, catalysts, elements, and techniques that must be mobilized in order to tame these reactions for synthetic purposes. Finally, it seems that new information is being added to that landscape at a rate that exceeds the ability of a normal person to keep up with it. In such a troubled setting any author, or group of authors, must be regarded as heroic if through their efforts, the task of the synthetic chemist is eased."

"We live in a troubled, but wonderful time. It is our good fortune to witness and benefit from scientific advances that would have been literally unimaginable to our grandparents. However, there are dark clouds on the horizon. The rate of growth of scientific knowledge has been so great as to outstrip the ability of our society to assimilate it, the capacity of the educational system to teach it properly and the wisdom of government adequately to sustain and apply it. There is growing indifference to science among the young. Even medical science, which touches the lives of us all, is generally left to the practitioners. Whatever the reason for this disparity between the importance of science and the lack of general public understanding, it is important to address it."

"There are already people who are world class in India, for example C.N.R. Rao (who has worked mainly in solid-state and structural chemistry). He is an example of how you can do first rate international work within India. So I would say to Indians — you have it within you to do this (in India)."

"Fundamental information about the workings of the cellular machinery at the atomic level and is already being exploited by pharmaceutical companies to make new, more effective antibiotics"

"Now many excellent scientists in India are doing really first rate work and it should not matter when the next Indian Nobel Prize is because they are doing very good work — that is what matters and the more you have this infrastructure, with good scientists within India, eventually someone will get a Nobel Prize for work done within India."

"It is fairly clear that American with recent foreign roots are overrepresented in any classification of Americans who have brought honour and recognition to the United States"

"It’s not about where you were born, or where you come from that makes you a good scientist. What you need are good teachers, co-students, facilities, [he said]. I honestly don’t think my roots have much to do with it. I’m sure this won’t make me popular, but this is what I think."

"My own lab has two Chinese, a Malaysian, a Canadian, an American, a German, it has had all sorts of people. And it’s actually fun because people from different countries come together, they have cultural exchanges, they learn more about each others’ countries and way of life. Science is a great international mixer, so the idea that it is a sort of cricket match where our team won — that simply is a wrong way of looking at scientific discovery."

"The ribosome does amazing chemistry, but I’m not a chemist…I’ve just learnt enough to work on my problem."

"It’s an absolutely good thing. I can think of one even better thing for young people, especially in India. It shows them you can study in India, get your basic education in India and you can (then) do whatever you want after that. That’s a very important message."

"Indians tend to be a little insecure and they should stop being insecure — I have visited India many times and I can tell you questions I get after my talks are as perceptive as anywhere else in the world, including places like Harvard or MIT. It’s perfectly fine to take pride that someone from their region has used their background and succeeded. That gives them a positive message that they can do anything that they want."

"Last year, the lecture was held in [an auditorium] with a capacity for just 300 people, and half the seats were empty. “What has changed? I am still the same person doing the same science. Why are people so impressed when some academy in Sweden gives an award?"

"Dr. Ramakrishnan addressing an audience of 3,000 at the university’s Centenary Auditorium."

"That is the wrong question to ask…You can’t go into science thinking of a Nobel Prize. You can only go into science because you’re interested in it."

"A life of science struck me as being both interesting and international in character."

"Many in my family were ambivalent about it, but my mother encouraged me to put aside my fears. Vera (my wife) and I finally decided to leave Utah, where we were very happy, take a 40 per cent salary cut and move to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge."

"This reconnection...has given me great satisfaction. I realise I have inadvertently become a source of inspiration and hope for people in India simply by the fact that I grew up there, went to my local university, but could go on to do well internationally. The Nobel, he says, is not just an affirmation of his past work; it’s an encouragement to keep working on interesting problems."

"You would have to ask a physicist really but I think understanding fundamental problems in physics is very important because they are part of our culture. You just never know what is going to come from it. If you had told Isaac Newton about spaceships and satellites that arise from his laws of gravity, it would have been science fiction to him."

"If I had complained about the prize before I got mine, they may have thought I was anticipating sour grapes. But I complained on the grounds that too many important scientists get missed out for Nobels. Science today is a highly collaborative exercise and to convert it into a contest, as the Nobel does, is a bad way to look at science. On the other hand, I am grateful to the committee for my award. It put the study of ribosome – the cellular machine that turns the blueprint of life into life itself – on front pages round the world."

"Find out what really fascinates you and follow that. Almost anything in nature, if you follow it, you will find a scientific problem. That is a better way to do it than following fads, because what is fashionable today may have been solved or fallen out of fashion once you have become a working scientist."

"I remember reading a Scientific American article about the use of new physical techniques – including neutron scattering – as a method for unravelling the structure of the ribosome. I was fascinated. I knew ribosomes were a big fundamental problem in science and this was a method for chipping away at it."

"It takes a certain amount of courage to tackle very hard problems in science, I now realise. You don't know what the timescale of your work will be: decades or only a few years. Or your approach may be fatally flawed and doomed to fail. Or you could get scooped just as you are finalising your work. It is very stressful."

"Scientists are trained to be rational and we are not trained to interact with people and develop social skills. Politics is about being able to convince people. Scientists could do with learning how to do that."

"I was quite insistent. We have quite a few pranksters in the lab and I thought this was one of them. I even congratulated the man, ironically, on his Swedish accent."

"I think it is the ability to tackle difficult problems in a sort of stable and supportive environment. I think that is the real key to it."

"I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner."

"I then got a PhD in physics [from Ohio University] though it was hatt hatt and hatt not a very good one."

"Indeed, many of the founding members of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology were immigrants themselves, and they helped to revolutionise modern biology.""

"Scientists work by a combination of intuition and insight in trying to understand a question."

"This is an honour that reflects the quality of science supported by the Medical Research Council, in particular at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. In my case, credit should go to the numerous dedicated postdocs, students, associates and colleagues who made crucial contributions to the work."

"In the current debate about immigration, it is worth noting that this award is yet another example of the numerous contributions that immigrants make to British society."

"No. Geeks make huge advances in society. Newton was the ultimate geek. It should be a compliment."

"People go into science out of curiosity, not to win awards. But scientists are human and have ambitions. Even the best scientists are often insecure and feel the need for recognition."

"A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library."

", to Frank Westheimer on presenting an idea: (Harvard Gazette)"

"History proves abundantly that pure science, undertaken without regard to applications to human needs, is usually ultimately of direct benefit to mankind. Within recent years it has become possible for purely scientific work of this character to be carried out with the support of industries, which are, of course, primarily interested in the commercial applications. The scientist who works in this way is frequently especially fortunate in that he not only derives the satisfactions which are characteristic of scientific work in general, but is able to see that many of his results are almost immediately put into a form which directly benefits mankind. Happy indeed is the scientist who not only has the pleasures which I have enumerated, but who also wins the recognition of fellow scientists and of the mankind which ultimately benefits from his endeavors. To my mind, the most important aspect of the Nobel Awards is that they bring home to the masses of the peoples of all nations, a realization of their common interests. They carry to those who have no direct contact with science the international spirit."

"To me, [it's] extremely interesting that men, perfectly honest, enthusiastic over their work, can so completely fool themselves."

"Science, almost from its beginnings, has been truly international in character. National prejudices disappear completely in the scientist’s search for truth. Medicine also disregards national boundaries. And literature frequently rises to heights that make it international. The scientist is motivated primarily by curiosity and a desire for truth. His attitude is objective rather than subjective. In his work he finds great satisfaction in discovering new facts or new relationships between known facts, but even greater pleasure is derived from seeing his results incorporated into the body of scientific knowledge and from seeing them willingly used by others in the further development of science."

"In general, the rate of evaporation (m) of a substance in a high vacuum is related to the pressure (p) of the saturated vapor by the equation m=\sqrt{\frac{M}{2\pi RT}}p. Red phosphorus and some other substances probably form exceptions to this rule."

"This fact, that all charges are integral multiples of a fundamental unit, is still one of the unexplained puzzles of fundamental physics. It does not in any way contradict electromagnetic theory, but it is not predicted by it, and until we have a more fundamental theory that explains it, we shall not feel that we really understand electromagnetic phenomena thoroughly. Presumably its explanation will not come until we understand quantum theory more thoroughly than we do at present."

"One of the most striking characteristics of this new modification of oxygen is its peculiar odor, and hence Schönbein calls it ozone, from a Greek verb signifying to smell. It frequently happens that a great discovery supplies the wanting links between a number of obscure facts, and thus adds quite as much to our knowledge by its indirect bearings as by the positive additions it makes to the general stock. So it has been with the discovery of ozone. Every one who has used an electrical machine must have noticed the peculiar smell which follows the electrical discharge. This was formerly supposed to be the odor of the electrical fluid itself; but as soon as ozone was discovered, the odor was recognized at once as belonging to this new agent, and it was soon ascertained that electricity is one of the most efficient means of modifying the oxygen of the air."

"Every discovery takes place in more than a scientific context."

"Our own culture, of Greek and Hebraic origin, is the one that interests us the most... We do not say that it is the best culture, but simply that it is ours. To claim that it of necessity superior would be wrong and evil. That attitude is the main source of international trouble in the world. ...Each nation prefers its own usages."

"I am obliged to deal with hundreds of men and to make them live without killing the reader."

"Superstitions... are nothing but persistent errors, foolish beliefs, and irrational fears. Superstitions are infinite in number and scope... It would not do to ignore them altogether, only if we should never forget the weakness and fragility of our minds. The consciousness that superstitions are rife in our own society is a healthy shock to our self-conceit and a warning. ...it lets us judge ancient superstitions with more indulgence and with a sense of humor. We could not overlook them without falsifying the general picture nor judge them too severely without hypocrisy."