Nobel Laureates In Physiology Or Medicine

"The women who changed the world never needed to show anything other than their own intelligence."

"I never had any hesitation or regrets in this sense. My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work and interests. I have never felt lonely."

"After centuries of dormancy, young women can now look toward a future moulded by their own hands."

"She seemed able to face with equal equanimity the rigours of fascist cruelty and suppression that she was dealt as a Jew; the problems of practising underground medicine in wartime; the difficulties posed by prejudice and discrimination against women; and the near isolation and challenges of those working at the cutting edge of science."

"She had this feeling for what was happening biologically. She was an intuitive observer, and she saw that something was making these nerve connections grow and was determined to find out what it was."

"The allegations against Fidia cannot be true. The process for awarding Nobel prizes is so complex that it cannot be corrupted."

"I am very conscious that there is no scientific explanation for the fact that we are conscious."

"For many years it was widely held that molecular biology was a completely useless subject, a 'fundamental' science of no interest to those working on practical matters"

"Current ideas of the uses of Model Organisms spring form the exemplars of the past and choosing the right organism for one's research is as important as finding the right problems to work on. In all my research these two problems have been closely intertwined."

"Like Feynman, Brenner is witty and has won a Nobel Prize. But most important for a legend, Brenner, like Feynman, has this wonderful superiority complex, which results in irreverence, disdain for authority, and allergy to pomposity. This is what young starting scientists love."

"A lot of the things that have been accomplished in science have been accomplished on the basis of ignorance … in the sense that you import into the science people from outside. Because once you have an established science, it has got its high priests — the guys who know everything that will work or won't work. And they don't want to be bothered. So you have to have a challenge. And the great thing is that young people are ignorant, and we should catch them before they turn into the priesthood. So I think that science should have a much more daring approach."

"Even God wouldn’t get a grant today because somebody on the committee would say, oh those were very interesting experiments (creating the universe), but they’ve never been repeated. And then someone else would say, yes and he did it a long time ago, what’s he done recently? And a third would say, to top it all, he published it all in an un-refereed journal (The Bible)."

"Then we started clinical work ... and I just wasn't suited to that. I didn't like ... the whole structure of a teaching hospital. That is, I felt very much that treating patients as things is the wrong thing. And since I thought it was very hard to be a scientist and not do this, then I preferred not to do it at all. So, in fact, I think I am the only person who has ever passed medicine who had never seen a patient until his examination — because I never went. And, in fact, one of the great stories is that I failed my medicine because I was asked to smell this patient's breath and correctly diagnosed Macleans toothpaste where I should have diagnosed acetone."

"Well, I think my skills are in getting things started. ... In fact, that's what I enjoy most — it's the opening game. And I'm afraid that once it gets past that point I get rather bored with it and want to do other things. ... The other thing I'm good at is talking."

"I think for the first time we can attack the fundamental biology of man."

"And the pursuit whose quest is Nature's understanding, has this among its rewards, that as it progresses its truth is testable. Truth is a 'value'. The quest itself is therefore in a measure its own satisfaction. We receive the lesson that our advance to knowledge is of asymptotic type, even as continually approaching so continually without arrival. The satisfaction shall therefore be eternal."

"Natural knowledge has not forgone emotion. It has simply taken for itself new ground of emotion, under impulsion from and in sacrifice to that one of its 'values', Truth."

"Mind, for anything perception can compass, goes therefore in our spatial world more ghostly than a ghost. Invisible, intangible, it is a thing not even of outline; it is not a 'thing'. It remains without sensual confirmation, and remains without it for ever. All that counts in life. Desire, zest, truth, love, knowledge, 'values', and, seeking metaphor to eke out expression, hell's depth and heaven's utmost height. Naked mind."

"Biology cannot go far in its subject before being met by mind."

"Science is the fruit of patient toil, sifting out facts and in search of more facts. It has no tilt against religion as such. It knows its own field to be vast, but also knows it limited."

"[A]s followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space."

"In the great head-end which has been mostly darkness springs up myriads of twinkling stationary lights and myriads of trains of moving lights of many different directions. It is as though activity from one of those local places which continued restless in the darkened main-mass suddenly spread far and wide and invaded all. The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns. Now as the waking body rouses, subpatterns of this great harmony of activity stretch down into the unlit tracks of the stalk-piece of the scheme. Strings of flashing and travelling sparks engage the lengths of it. This means that the body is up and rises to meet its waking day."

"In the training and in the exercise of medicine a remoteness abides between the field of neurology and that of mental health, psychiatry. It is sometimes blamed to prejudice on the part of the one side or the other. It is both more grave and less grave than that. It has a reasonable basis. It is rooted in the energy-mind problem. Physiology has not enough to offer about the brain in relation to the mind to lend the psychiatrist much help."

"[M]an's life of all lives is the most completely and fully bound to earth because life's experience, wholly earthly, is in man's case the most complete and full. […] Man is the most, not the least, earthly of all creatures."

"The gap between 'the State' and 'a machine' is not so wide."

"The influence of mind on the doings of life makes mind an effective contribution to life. We can seize then how mind counts and has counted. That it has been evolved seems to assure us that it has counted. How it has counted would seem to be that the finite mind has influenced its individual's 'doing'. Lloyd Morgan, the biologist, urged that, 'the primary aim, object, and purpose of consciousness is control'. Dame Nature seems to have taken the like view."

"A vast number, perhaps the numerical majority, of animal forms cannot be shown unequivocally to possess mind."

"The 'motion' of an energy-system is its 'behaviour'. Various types of organization of system produce on that basis various types of behaviour. A grey rock, said Ruskin, is a good sitter. That is one type of behaviour. A darting dragon-fly is another type of behaviour. We call the one alive, the other not. But both are fundamentally balances of give and take of motion with their surround. To make 'life' a distinction between them is at root to treat them both artificially."

"The brain is a mystery—it has been—and still will be. Not that we do not know many facts about it. The facts we know have indeed greatly multiplied in recent years, but they all fail to give us a key to the mystery of how it creates—if it does create—our thoughts and feelings; that is, said more concisely though less concretely, our mind."

"Natural science is a branch of knowledge by general consent not primarily based on the a priori. It […] observes and endeavours by observation to follow and trace the 'how' of what happens in Nature. It proceeds further to generalize about this 'how'. It tries to decipher something of it in the past and to forecast something of it in the future. Above all it expends its utmost pains on attempting to describe the 'how' fully and accurately by first-hand observation at this present."

"The scientific journey has no end. It has only halting places—points at which the traveller can look round and survey."

"It is difficult to get a hearing from busy men for even a great new truth."

"Today Nature looms larger than ever and includes more fully than ever ourselves. It is, if you will, a machine, but it is a partly mentalized machine, and in virtue of including ourselves it is a machine with human qualities of mind. It is a running stream of energy—mental and physical—and unlike man-made machines it is actuated by emotions, fears and hopes, dislikes and love. It bids fair to be master of this our planet—'it looks before and after'. To what or to whom does it owe this eminent and seemingly unique status? It answers unhesitatingly that it owes it to itself. But to the semi-divine assembly which looks on, that answer would be impertinent but for its saving ignorance. We may suppose that if they hear it the stars smile. Human thought is left wondering. What is it all for? Man is too small and too perishable to be the object of this whole. A counsel is 'let us endure and be quiet'—a counsel which is the easier to follow because it seems all that there is for us to do, at least at the present moment."

"When I received the Nobel Prize, the only big lump sum of money I have ever seen, I had to do something with it. The easiest way to drop this hot potato was to invest it, to buy shares. I knew that World War II was coming and I was afraid that if I had shares which rise in case of war, I would wish for war. So I asked my agent to buy shares which go down in the event of war. This he did. I lost my money and saved my soul."

"[When I joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton] I did this in the hope that by rubbing elbows with those great atomic physicists and mathematicians I would learn something about living matters. But as soon as I revealed that in any living system there are more than two electrons, the physicists would not speak to me. With all their computers they could not say what the third electron might do. The remarkable thing is that it knows exactly what to do. So that little electron knows something that all the wise men of Princeton don't, and this can only he something very simple."

"Mi è impossibile cingere i fianchi di una ragazza con il mio braccio destro e serrare il suo sorriso nella mia mano sinistra, per poi tentare di studiare i due oggetti separatamente. Allo stesso modo, non ci è possibile separare la vita dalla materia vivente, allo scopo di studiare la sola materia vivente e le sue reazioni. Inevitabilmente, studiando la materia vivente e le sue reazioni, studiamo la vita stessa."

"Psalmus Humanus My Lord, Who are You? ... Are you the Universe itself? Or the Law which Ruled it? ... Are you the maker, or did I shape You, That I may share my loneliness and shun my responsibility? God! ...I am calling to You, for I am in trouble, Frightened of myself and my fellow men! ..."

"Szent-Györgyi's offbeat ideas came to Mr. Moss's attention in 1980 when he was promoting his book The Cancer Syndrome. "I was dubious about his work," Mr. Moss said. Then The Saturday Evening Post asked him to interview Szent-Györgyi and "I was just bowled over by him. Linus Pauling said he was the most charming man in science. He had this easy gift of winning people over.""

"[B]rutalizing wars and military life... are capable of turning decent fellows into ers who can shoot women and children down in cold blood."

"The battle... is for the minds of men; the outcome... does not depend on numbers of missiles, but on the question of which system can raise life higher, give more happiness... and raise the great undeveloped masses out of their misery. ...Now there are two parties: democracy and communism. Why not embark on a noble competition by showing which... can create a better, freer, happier life?"

"The great hope of mankind is still the United Nations."

"I am not dreaming of a Utopia, only of a world in which problems are not resolved by force but by intelligence, good will and equity; a world in which killing, no matter the reason, and the destruction of a fellow man's life or home, is a crime; a world in which our youth in which our youth will not have to spend their years studying organized manslaughter, in which neither force nor megatons nor poison gases will decide a nation's standing but the sum of its knowledge, its ethics, the gifts it makes to mankind, the happiness it gives to men, the measure in which it lifts human life."

"Even pure truth, which has no application... elevates life."

"Science is life-oriented. ...[A]rmies and armaments are death-oriented. Armies are instruments of organized manslaughter... All its tools are the tools of death... instruments of killing. ...[A] society dominated by the military is death-centered, as pointed out by in his famous Moratorium Speech."

"The primary aim of science is to find... new truth. The search is the more successful the more it is directed towards... truth for its own sake, regardless of... possible use or application. ...If everything given to us by research were to be taken away, civilization would collapse and we would stand naked, searching for caves again."

"Between the two world wars, at the heydey of Colonialism, force reigned supreme. ...[I]t was natural for the weaker to lie down before the stronger. ...Gandhi, chasing out of his country... the greatest military power on earth... taught the world that there are higher things than force, higher even than life... [H]e proved that force had lost its suggestive power... information which did not reach the Pentagon or the government: we cannot win in win in Viet Nam because the people are willing to die faster than we can kill them."

"DNA... is the most wonderful thing in the world... Mankind went through epidemics, famine, and...trials, yet nature kept this... intact, because all life depends on it. ...[M]an has found a means to damage it. High energy radiation does so. ...There may ...be survivors after after an atomic war, but those... will be unable to produce a healthy progeny. Their progeny will be beset by abnormalities, monstrosities and diseases... and there will be no way back."

"Out children came into this world with "clean and empty minds." What they learn... is markedly different from... children of the pre-War world. Today's adults look... through glasses of pre-War and pre-scientific values. They think... all the world needs a little bit of patching... The result... we get deeper... into trouble. The modern scientific revolution had made all human s age faster... as a consequence we have a hypocritical world... Our youth rejects this anachronism wholesale. ...They find everything a lie. The great political parties... out for profit and power, the military for domination, fattening itself with their young bodies... churches preaching love but raising no voice against the slaughter of undeveloped people... driving the world toward overpopulation... resisting family planning... always on the side of power. And they see while half of the children of the world go to sleep hungry... we spend hundreds of billions to raise our stack of nuclear bombs and missiles... They see... most political leaders... mindful only of... re-election... keeping power... with arguments which should be rejected by the simplest logic, refuting the great ideals on which our country was built."

"From on high a human life must look very small, a notion that moved Walt Whitman to sing about the arrogance and audacity of elected government officials. ...Unfortunately, this collective code of morals... [w]e all share... as soon as... we participate in government... when we go to the polls to elect hawks and vote the endless billions for war and... formidable machines for killing and destruction, and then go to church and ask for God's blessing."

"I am not religious, but I am a pious man... A religious man has a definite religion. He says "God is there" or "God is there," "God is there." "Your god is not my god, and that's all." But the pious man, he just looks out with awe, and says, "where is God?" And "well, I don't understand it and I would like to know what this creation really means." That is a pious man, who is really touched by the greatness of nature and of the creation."