"Are we making more mistakes now? I don't think so. Science is a high-risk activity. And when you do science—this is very important incidentally for the general public, and for policy makers—if you are not wasting some of your money, you are not doing good science. It's a funny way to say this. You've got to back high-risk opportunities. And high-risk opportunities means some fraction of them are going to fail. And I think in any science funding scenario, you've got to say, 10, 20, maybe even 30% of your funds are going to be invested in failures."
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Academics from the United StatesJews from the United StatesInventorsNobel laureates in PhysicsPhysicists from the United States
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From the Winding Your Way through DNA symposium at the University of California, San Francisco in 1992 (URL accessed on October 20, 2008)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leon_M._Lederman
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Leon M. Lederman
Leon Max Lederman (15 July 1922 in New York - October 3 2018) was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Aca
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