Research And Discovery Quotes & Sayings

I recently asked more than seventy eminent researchers if they would have done I their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: no. I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome: the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions: improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss. — Philip S. Skell

The medicines of today are based upon thousands of years of knowledge accumulated from folklore, serendipity and scientific discovery. The new medicines of tomorrow will be based on the discoveries that are being made now, arising from basic research in laboratories around the world. — John Vane

The Most Secret Quintessence of Life is an original work filled with rich, new research, relying on important primary literature which has not, until now, been plumbed and digested. In this book, Chandak Sengoopta offers both a history of hormone discovery and a chronicle of how this discovery transformed our concepts of the body and how our existing concepts of sex and sexuality, in turn, informed our concepts for understanding hormones. — Anne Fausto-Sterling

Will fluorine ever have practical applications?
It is very difficult to answer this question. I may, however, say in all sincerity that I gave this subject little thought when I undertook my researches, and I believe that all the chemists whose attempts preceded mine gave it no more consideration.
A scientific research is a search after truth, and it is only after discovery that the question of applicability can be usefully considered. — Henri Moissan

Hard as it is to imagine, there's a move afoot in Congress to take away the public's free online access to tax-funded medical research findings. That would be bad for medical discovery, bad for patients looking for the latest research results, and another rip-off of the American taxpayer. — Richard J. Roberts

Oersted would never have made his great discovery of the action of galvanic currents on magnets had he stopped in his researches to consider in what manner they could possibly be turned to practical account; and so we would not now be able to boast of the wonders done by the electric telegraphs. Indeed, no great law in Natural Philosophy has ever been discovered for its practical implications, but the instances are innumerable of investigations apparently quite useless in this narrow sense of the word which have led to the most valuable results. — William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

[In the case of research director, Willis R. Whitney, whose style was to give talented investigators as much freedom as possible, you may define 'serendipity' as] the art of profiting from unexpected occurrences. When you do things in that way you get unexpected results. Then you do something else and you get unexpected results in another line, and you do that on a third line and then all of a sudden you see that one of these lines has something to do with the other. Then you make a discovery that you never could have made by going on a direct road. — Irving Langmuir

For me, I can't understand something unless I've experienced it and I tend to be very judgmental by nature. But, it's very telling when you see the world from the other side of the lens because it opens the door to self-discovery. Perspective changes everything. I prefer empathy to sympathy if I have a choice. That's where the research comes in. I've packed a lot of life into the past few years trying to understand people and situations. Trying to make sense of my life. I have a lot to work through. My past is something that requires introspection and forgiveness. And that takes time. Research. When I feel like I've learned something about myself and grown as a person, I move on to the next journey. Hopefully with new perspective. — Kim Holden

It is helpful to remember that the most strong-willed children tend to be the ones who identify the most strongly with their parents. So instead of viewing their seemingly constant challenges as defiance or attempts to thwart authority, work to parent from a place of understanding that your strong-willed child is actually on a discovery mission and is doing endless 'research' on you by testing and retesting and digging and chiseling to discover all of your quirks and foibles and ups and downs and strengths and weaknesses. — L.R. Knost

He that would speak Divine things in a language which living men of to-day can comprehend, must keep up with the researches and discoveries of men who study nature, and put her words into the speech of the present. — John H. Vincent

Our novice runs the risk of failure without additional traits: a strong inclination toward originality, a taste for research, and a desire to experience the incomparable gratification associated with the act of discovery itself. — Santiago Ramon Y Cajal

The trend lines in research and innovation look good for places such as India and China and less good for America as we go forward. So even if you're not enchanted by the prospect of cosmic discovery, the prospect of dying poor may be what it takes to understand the role of this adventure in the future of the natural world in which we live. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple. — Thomas A. Edison

Most of my scientific work has been basic research. There were no immediate uses for my discoveries, but today the radioisotopes are the workhorses of nuclear medicine, an isotope of plutonium is a major energy source in the space program, and the element americium is critical to the smoke detectors in every house in the country. — Glenn T. Seaborg

The deep study of nature is the most fruitful source of mathematical discoveries. By offering to research a definite end, this study has the advantage of excluding vague questions and useless calculations; besides it is a sure means of forming analysis itself and of discovering the elements which it most concerns us to know, and which natural science ought always to conserve. — Joseph Fourier

This whole universe, with all its vastness, grandeur and beauty, is nothing but sheer imagination. In spite of so many discoveries, researches and scientific knowledge, the creation remains a great unsolved riddle. — Meher Baba

With the discovery of Zinjanthropus at Olduvai Gorge in 1959, my grandmother Mary Leakey pioneered the research in East Africa with my grandfather Louis. Many more spectacular fossil finds have since been made, both in Africa and elsewhere, by many researchers driven to understand our past. — Louise Leakey

When speaking of a "body of knowledge" or of "the results of research," e.g., we tacitly assign the same cognitive status to inherited knowledge and to independently acquired knowledge. To counteract this tendency a special effort is required to transform inherited knowledge into genuine knowledge by revitalizing its original discovery, and to discriminate between the genuine and the spurious elements of what claims to be inherited knowledge. — Leo Strauss

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization. — Edmund White

Oppenheimer's theorizing was so startlingly original - so far in advance of the corroborating observations and so far off the beaten track of astrophysical research - that his colleagues' ignorance cost him the recognition he deserved. — Algis Valiunas

It is ironic that in the same year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, some would have us ban certain forms of DNA medical research. Restricting medical research has very real human consequences, measured in loss of life and tremendous suffering for patients and their families. — Michael J. Fox

It is true that my discovery of LSD was a chance discovery, but it was the outcome of planned experiments and these experiments took place in the framework of systematic pharmaceutical, chemical research. It could better be described as serendipity. — Albert Hofmann

I doubt that Fleming could have obtained a grant for the discovery of penicillin on that basis [a requirement for highly detailed research plans] because he could not have said, 'I propose to have an accident in a culture so that it will be spoiled by a mould falling on it, and I propose to recognize the possibility of extracting an antibiotic from this mould. — Hans Selye

The account of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as the manuscripts are inaccurately designated, and of the half a century of intense research that followed, is in itself a fascinating as well as an exasperating story. — Geza Vermes

She discovered in a series of beautifully executed researches the fundamental distinction between carbons that turned on heating into graphite and those that did not. Further she related this difference to the chemical constitution of the molecules from which carbon was made. She was already a recognized authority in industrial physico-chemistry when she chose to abandon this work in favour of the far more difficult and more exciting fields of biophysics.

{Bernal on the death of scientist Rosalind Franklin} — J. D. Bernal

I start each of my scripts by going on a journey of painstaking research and discovery, much as I do a piece of long-lead journalism. — Peter Landesman

It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known. — Peter Medawar

My three years at the NIH were critical in my scientific education. I learned an immense amount about the research process: developing assays, purifying macromolecules, documenting a discovery by many approaches, and writing clear manuscripts describing what is known and what remains to be investigated. — Stanley B. Prusiner

To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one's ability to learn something new that exceed the frameworks with which one enters. — J. Jack Halberstam

I'll admit that the discovery of evolution is humbling, but it is also empowering. It transforms our relationship to the life around us. Instead of being outsiders watching the natural world go by, we are insiders. We are part of the process; we are the exquisite result of billions of years of natural research and development. — Bill Nye

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded ... in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

The new supplants the old. Yet men's minds are stuffed with outworn bunk. Educating the young in the latest findings of authorities and scholars in the social sciences is important. It is equally important to devise ways and means for aiding the middle-aged and old to reexamine hang-over unscientific doctrines and ideas in the light of recent discovery and research. — Mary Barnett Gilson

During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem. — Thomas A. Edison

The discovery of deuterium and the marked differences in the physical and chemical properties of hydrogen and deuterium, together with an efficient method for the separation of these isotopes, have opened an interesting field of research in several of the major branches of science. — Harold Urey

I love the journeys of research and discovery their development takes me on. I see prints as less 'decorative' than many might, and more fundamental to a garment's core. — Dries Van Noten

Empower yourself and discover what you can do with your life through hard work, concentration and research — Sunday Adelaja

We are the number one economy in the world, and we ought to continue to pursue those kinds of policies that ensure that we maintain that position, like innovation and like technology and like education and like just research and development and discovery. — Donald Evans

The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss the usual activity of science but also, and more unfortunately, convey a false impression about what drives research. — Stephen Jay Gould

It is curiosity, initiative, originality, and the ruthless application of honesty that count in research- much more than feats of logic and memory alone. — Julian Huxley

Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery - the frontier that drives the economies of the future - would be incalculable. I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Whether or not LSD research and therapy will return to society, the discoveries that psychedelics made possible have revolutionary implications for our understanding of the psyche, human nature, and the nature of reality. — Stanislav Grof

When I moved to Wales more than twenty years ago and began to research 'Here Be Dragons,' I was fascinated from the first by the Welsh medieval laws, by the discovery that women enjoyed a greater status in Wales than elsewhere in Europe. — Sharon Kay Penman

I don't know of many people who've done sex research with an eye toward people saying sex is bad for you, except for the promiscuity and cervical cancer link - which is actually a valid discovery. — Mary Roach

But medicine has long had all its means to hand, and has discovered both a principle and a method, through which the discoveries made during a long period are many and excellent, while full discovery will be made, if the inquirer be competent, conduct his researches with knowledge of the discoveries already made, and make them his starting-point. But anyone who, casting aside and rejecting all these means, attempts to conduct research in any other way or after another fashion, and asserts that he has found out anything, is and has been victim of deception. — Hippocrates

It is the logic of research and discovery that is tortuous, because it is the logic of science. Whereas the logic of knowledge needs no discovery, because it knows already. — Umberto Eco

Memorizing and regurgitating are not science. Real science is a constant investigation of the unknown. — Abhijit Naskar

The old rules may say we can't protect our environment and promote economic growth at the same time, but in America, we've always used new technologies - we've used science; we've used research and development and discovery to make the old rules obsolete. — Barack Obama

Thus, it does not seem clear (to us) that there is truly a unified research program here, under the name of materialism. The apparent consensus could be something of a mirage, with the only thing holding it together being a denial of the Soul Hypothesis. If so, it begins to look more like a shared assumption than a shared discovery. And of course there can be consensuses based on fashion and the spirit of the age, as well as consensuses based on observation and reason. Even scientists must always be on guard to make sure they are part of the latter rather than the former. The honorable mantle of the scientist conveys no inherent infallibility in this regard. — Mark C. Baker

Research at the subatomic quantum level reveals an invisible connection between all particles and all members of a given species. This oneness is being demonstrated in remarkable scientific discoveries. The findings show that physical distance, what we think of as empty space, does not preclude a connection by invisible forces. Obviously there exist invisible connections between our thoughts and our actions. We do not deny this, even though the connection is impervious to our senses. — Wayne Dyer

Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, "discovery" of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies. — Moses Finley