It Has Been Said

IT HAS BEEN SAID and collected by ARNOLD VAN DEN HOOFF* "Can—and should—life be described in terms of molecules? For many, such description seems to diminish the beauty of Nature. For others of us, the beauty and wonder of nature are nowhere more manifest than in the submicroscopic plan of life."—R. A. Weinberg. "Nature seems to ignore our intellectual need for convenience and unity, and is very often pleased with complexity and diversity."—Ramón y Cajal "If a theory is on the right track then the simplifications will grow into more comprehensive articulations; otherwise it will shrivel and die."—Barbara Churchland "Medical-biological research often amounts to destroying something in order to find out how it worked when it was still intact."—Leo Vroman "To feed applied science by starving basic science is like economising on the foundation of a building so that it may be built higher."—Sir George Porter "Socrates and Plato and Augustine and Aquinas did not invent stoves or improve lamps because it never occurred to them that it was particularly worth while to do so."—J. Wood Krutch "Forbidding man to seek God, he [Bacon] gave him in exchange full permission to invent as many lamps and stoves as his ingenuity could devise."—J. Wood Krutch»Kasteellaan 3, 7004 JK-DOETINCHEM, The Netherlands. Material appearing under this title is collected with the aim of making the serious a bit less serious, the ponderous a bit less heavy, and the reading hours a bit more fun. Toward this goal we invite a guest editor of this feature for each issue. Will readers volunteer to share their senses of humor by collecting or recollecting items that have brought smiles to their faces? We invite your participation. Originals are also welcomed. 234 I It Has Been Said "I assure you that a learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant fool."— Molière "He was all the time busy excerpting and everything he read passed from one book, bypassing his head, in another one."—G. C. Lichtenberg "The first sign of the unreadability of a book is the impossibility of holding it in the hand when reading it in bed, where most people do their reading."— Sebastian Haffner "Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when He did not want to sign."— Anatole France "Scientific 'papers' in the form in which they are communicated to learned journals are notorious for misrepresenting the process of thought that led to whatever discoveries they describe."—Peter Medawar "If you cannot—in the long run—tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless."—E. Schrödinger "No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there."—F. Scott Fitzgerald "The stuff you read in the literature, 90% is bullshit, maybe 95%, maybe even 98%—you can quote me."—Anonymous "We teach quantum theory on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and wave theory on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays."—Sir William Bragg "Each time an experimental result shows some contraction in an existing theory , progress is in sight, because then a change and improvement of the theory becomes necessary."—Max Planck "If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all."—Miguel de Unamuno "A great deal of knowledge, which is not capable of making a man wise, has a natural tendency to make him vain and arrogant."—Joseph Addison "Some people think that they know a bird exactly when they have seen the egg from which it hatched."—Heinrich Heine "The average value of conversations could be enormously improved by the constant use of four simple words: ? do not know.'"—André Maurois "The pleasure of criticizing robs us of the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things."—Jean de la Bruyère Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 32, 2 ¦ Winter 1989 \ 235 ". . . the genetic code, written in the four-letter alphabet, ?,' 'G,' 'C,' 'T.' Here, then, floating in the nuclear sap, is the code which governs the skill ofcreating a six-foot drum major with a slight squint and dimpled cheeks, out ofan egg with a diameter of...