It Has Been Said

IT HAS BEEN SAID and collected by D. W. BROWN* "While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research."—Francis Crick "The main stumbling block in the way of any progress is and always has been unimpeachable tradition."—Chieng-Shiung Wu "I was startled when I found they didn't understand it, didn't take it seriously."— Barbara McClintock "Semmelweiss's fundamental problem was this: the validity of his findings exposed the incompetency of his colleagues."—D. W. Brown "Parents, teachers, and geniuses are seldom appreciated until it's too late."— D. W. Brown "Not having experience with many fathers, I didn't realize how remarkable he was. How did he learn the deep principles of science and the love of it, what's behind it, and why it's worth doing? I never really asked him, because Ijust assumed that those were things that fathers knew."—Richard P. Feynman "Although my mother didn't know anything about science, she had a great influence on me as well. In particular, she had a wonderful sense ofhumor, and I learned from her that the highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion."—Richard P. Feynman "It's bad enough to know the past—it would be intolerable to know the future ." —Somerset Maugham "Naturally, as the time over which one is trying to forecast gets longer, so the problem becomes more difficult. One way of tackling this subject is to look back and try to imagine that one had made forecasts in the past about important scientific discoveries. It is easy to show that many important discoveries are of a rather unexpected nature and therefore are difficult to foresee."—Francis Crick *Address: 55 Smyrna Powder Springs Rd. SE, Marietta, Georgia: 30060-7045. 404 I It Has Been Said "I don't care to comment about the future of anything."—Linus Pauling "Never do anything that bores you. My experience in science is that someone is always telling you to do things that leave you flat. Bad idea. I'm not good enough to do well something I dislike. In fact, I find it hard enough to do well something that I like. And that brings up another reason for having people around who care about you—you have to have people you can go to for intellectual help."—James D. Watson "We are all ignorant—only about different subjects."—Will Rogers "Looking around the room here, I realize how limited all of us are."—Eugene P. Wigner "The problem which many an aspiring man finds so difficult to solve is to recognize the merits ofhis older contemporaries without allowing himselfto be hindered by their shortcomings."—Goethe "Great, indeed, must be the zeal for improvement, which an academic education cannot extinguish."—Thomas Love Peacock "When one loses one's interest for something, one also loses the memory for it."—Goethe "The person of fine taste does condemn nearly everything. He takes his pleasure in a number of books so limited as to be almost nothing in comparison with the total mass of production."—Arnold Bennett "I never know what people are going to give me next. One lady sent me a book: Forty Ways of Making Love. The book, Forty Ways of Making Love, sounded exciting but it was just verses and they weren't very good. I had to pack it away in the grip over there so that the Sisters wouldn't get the wrong idea."—George Santayana as an octogenarian at the clinic of the Convent of the Blue Nuns in Rome "So many books! So few books worth reading."—Aldous Huxley "If a man has not read the newspapers for some months, and then reads them all together, he will find out how much time is wasted on this class of literature."— Goethe "Unqualified activity, of any kind whatsoever, will at last lead to bankruptcy."— Goethe "The clinical investigator fails when he lets problems choose and dominate him, rather than the reverse. The investigator must ask...