Eric Betzig Quotes

In essence, we're imaging the same cell for anywhere from forty to a hundred thousand times to create one of the movies that we see.

Frankly, I guess, I don't really understand why people, why so many people, are so risk averse. You know, there's always ways to wiggle your way out of any situation if you're motivated enough.

You get so tied up with the minutiae of the day-to-day, there's never a chance to sit back and let your subconscious run wild.

When I listen to music from different eras, I sense different things. The 1940s music, there's so much optimism and romance, maybe because they just solved the biggest problem on Earth at that time - World War II. In the 1960s, there was so much creativity and innovation in sound.

We can track and see the production of single molecules, trace them and see how they assemble into structures.

I missed the basic curiosity of being in the lab.

I really didn't like the academic structure of science, but I realized I loved science and missed science.

I don't like saying 'no' to people, and I'm going to have to learn how to say 'no' more.

You need a continuous picture of how things are evolving, and not a slow series of snapshots where you don't know how frame A is related to frame B.

I was born in 1960 and can still tell you the name of every astronaut from Mercury to Apollo. If I had a chance, I'd love to go into space on one of the privately developed space crafts.

It always irritated me that people think they have to be locked into a career path.

There's always something that an engineer can do to make microscopes better.

The eventual goal is to marry all of my work together to make a high-speed, high-resolution, low-impact tool that can look deep inside biological systems.

Every new invention is like a baby. You think it may cure cancer or become the president, but in the end, you're happy it just stays out of jail.

Chemistry was always my weakest subject in high school and college.

In my opinion, the only real asset one has is one's reputation, right? I mean, any company and institution can go belly up at any time. But if you have a good reputation, you know, you can usually find somebody who can - who thinks they can use what you have to offer.

Science goes through fads, and there are big ups and crashes.

I hate driving a bandwagon.

There are many cells you could look at forever in 3D.

It's nice to be able to look at one protein, but life is driven by the interactions between proteins, so it's really essential to be able to see multiple proteins at a time to understand these interactions.

It takes a huge amount of effort to move from a successful high-tech prototype to broader adoption of an imaging technology.

Like you can't have a car that can take the kids to schools on Friday and win the grand prix on Saturday, you can't make a microscope that can do it all.