Walter Gilbert Quotes

Scientists tend to be skeptical, but the weakness of the community of science is that it tends to move into preformed establishment modes that say this is the only way of doing science, the only valid view.

By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and you stretch your own mind, and very often you learn something new.

[Duesberg] is absolutely correct in saying that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by the AIDS virus. And he is absolutely correct that the virus cultured in the laboratory may not be the cause of AIDS.

The interaction of the variation in our genes is what's responsible for lots of our attributes and vigor.

Science doesn't in the slightest depend on trust. It depends completely on the belief that you can demonstrate something for yourself.

We know specific genes are turned on in specific cells, but we don't know to what extent this happens.

We haven't been able yet to determine in terms of genes what makes a human being a human and not another mammal.

The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.

We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.

The community as a whole doesn't listen patiently to critics who adopt alternative viewpoints. Although the great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through the conflict of viewpoints.

Here is a human being; it's me!

Error is far more common than fraud which probably comprises 1 percent or a tenth of a percent of the literature.

I have the same sense of the power and virtue of knowledge that some people get from a religious background.