Joshua Lederberg Quotes

I was a bad practicing physician because I was never sure of the diagnosis or of the treatment.

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.

Everybody has to learn for the first time.

Being successful at a very young age gave me the confidence and the capability to try out other things.

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.

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.

My ambitions were already very clearly fixed by the time I was 6 or 7.

I certainly saw science as a kind of calling, and one with as much legitimacy as a religious calling.

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.

If lifespan jumps by 30 or 40 years, that has enormous implications.

I don't believe anybody can really grasp everything that's even in one textbook.

The single biggest threat to man's continued dominance on the planet is the virus.

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.

I got my Nobel Prize for my lab work.

I believe I am a person with unusual talents. I think I'd be a liar or stupid if I were to deny that.

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.

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.

When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells.

We are all very individual. You have to find out what you can do best, and be self-conscious about that.

If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.

By the time I was 12 or 13, I was studying biochemistry textbooks.

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.

The central moral issue of science is that we do not have a science of peace and hardly know where to begin in building one.

A Swedish newspaper reporter called and said, You've been awarded the Prize. I was quite sure it was a practical joke.

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.