Any living cell carries with it the experience of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors.
Max DelbruckRead
A strong feeling of adventure is animating those who are working on bacterial viruses, a feeling that they have a small part in the great drive towards a fundamental problem in biology.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the excitement and importance of scientific exploration, particularly in the field of biology.
Max Delbruck emphasizes the thrill and significance scientists feel while researching bacterial viruses, suggesting that their contributions are integral to understanding major biological challenges. This sense of adventure motivates them to participate in the broader quest for knowledge in biology and the mysteries of life.
In practice
In a speech about scientific exploration at a conference, one could mention this quote to inspire young scientists.
Any living cell carries with it the experience of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors.
The science of the mind can only have for its proper goal the understanding of human nature by every human being, and through its use, brings peace to every human soul.
Farming is the riskiest profession in the world since the fate of the crop is closely linked to the behaviour of the monsoon.
But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective scientific method, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology.
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.
The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.
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