Yes. I'm a doctor, an epidemiologist, and lots of my professional colleagues flip back and forth between industry and medical roles. I know them; they are not bad people. But it is possible for good people in bad systems to do things that inflict enormous harm.
Interpretation
Even well-intentioned individuals can cause harm when operating within flawed systems.
This quote highlights the complexity of human behavior, particularly in professional settings. It emphasizes that people who are fundamentally good can still contribute to negative outcomes when they are part of broken systems or structures that do not support ethical practices, suggesting a need for reform and awareness in such environments.
In practice
During a conference on public health, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of ethical practices in medical systems.
Teaching needs an ecosystem that supports evidence-based practice. It will need better systems to disseminate the results of research more widely, but also a better understanding of research, so that teachers can be critical consumers of evidence.
Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.
What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.
All of my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to find scientific answers to them. If, like me, you have looked at the stars, and tried to make sense of what you see, you too have started to wonder what makes the universe exist.
Mankind will not forever remain on Earth but, in the pursuit of light and space, will first timidly emerge from the bounds of the atmosphere and then advance until he has conquered the whole of circumsolar space.
At the sight of a single bone, of a single piece of bone, I recognize and reconstruct the portion of the whole from which it would have been taken. The whole being to which this fragment belonged appears in my mind's eye.
It turned out that the buckyball, the soccer ball, was something of a Rosetta stone of an infinite new class of molecules.
Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility... It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission.
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