Quotes by Joshua Lederberg

• If we have isolated individuals able to inflict enormous harm, imagine what a single lunatic can do with a nuclear weapon. I think the whole base of civil society is at risk.
• I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room.
• I wish I had a talent for dropping things as well as taking on new ones. It gets to be quite a clutter after a while.
• I'd like to put in a vote for the intrinsic fascination of science.
• I'm chairing a UNESCO committee on how to improve global Internet communications for science; help third-world people get onto the Net so they can be part of the process.
• I'm not easily inhibited by the fact that I don't know something about a subject. It doesn't stop me from dabbling in it.
• If it takes you 20 or 25 years to establish yourself in one field, you really ought to be careful not to stray too far.
• If lifespan jumps by 30 or 40 years, that has enormous implications.
• If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing.
• If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.
• Life's a hobby.
• My ambitions were already very clearly fixed by the time I was 6 or 7.
• So many of the things I've predicted were technologies that were just sitting right in front of us.
• I was making a lot of momentous personal decisions. I was still very very young: when the prize was awarded, I was 33; the work I had done when I was 21.
• We are all very individual. You have to find out what you can do best, and be self-conscious about that.
• Try hard to find out what you're good at and what your passions are, and where the two converge, and build your life around that.
• To have the recognition of your colleagues is great. The public attention is a mixed blessing.
• Everybody has to learn for the first time.
• I think we have to believe we are here for some purpose, and I know there are many cynics who will deny it, but they don't live as if they deny it.
• When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells.
• A Swedish newspaper reporter called and said, You've been awarded the Prize. I was quite sure it was a practical joke.
• All of civility depends on being able to contain the rage of individuals.
• Although I am a public figure, I'm still a little shy. I don't think my own personality is important. I prefer to keep some small dosage of privacy.
• As soon as you go into any biological process in any real detail, you discover it's open-ended in terms of what needs to be found out about it.
• By the time I was 12 or 13, I was studying biochemistry textbooks.
• I believe I am a person with unusual talents. I think I'd be a liar or stupid if I were to deny that.
• I certainly saw science as a kind of calling, and one with as much legitimacy as a religious calling.
• I did get a very fine education, and not just in science. It took some pressure on the part of my elders to convince me that I really should take an interest in humanities.
• I don't believe anybody can really grasp everything that's even in one textbook.
• I get curious about new things. My real strength is going into a field that has not been investigated before, and finding new approaches to it.
• I got my Nobel Prize for my lab work.
• I have many shortcomings. I feel very lucky to have been able to have what I've had.
• I hope I've lived a life of science whose style will encourage younger people.
• I started on the use of the Internet for scientific communication. Our research group was one of the very first to make really systematic use of it as a way of managing research projects.
• Being successful at a very young age gave me the confidence and the capability to try out other things.