Top 24 Quotes & Sayings by Walter Gilbert

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.

Today we try to identify a gene and then study its properties.

Early on, it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise, even if what you're writing about is not that relevant.

It's easier to change what you do than people think it is. If you don't change, your field changes around you.

Why do we do basic research? To learn about ourselves.

Everyone wants a hand in the outcome, a piece of the knowledge.

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

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

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

Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.

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

The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.

In 15 years we'll have all the sequence, a list of the genes everyone has in common and those that differ among people. We know only something like a tenth of 1 percent of the sequence at the moment.

The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.

The best project is one that asks a novel question.

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

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

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.

I am afraid that those comments go back to the late 80's. At that time I was a skeptic - the argument based on Koch's postulates to try to distinguish between cause and association. Today I would regard the success of the many antiviral agents which lower the virus titers (to be expected) and also resolve the failure of the immune system (only expected if the virus is the cause of the failure) as a reasonable proof of the causation argument .

Three billion bases of DNA sequence can be put on a single compact disc and one will be able to pull a CD out of one's pocket and say, 'Here is a human being; it's me!'

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.

Biology will tell you a lot of things, but there are many that it can not explain and you need to look at physics instead.

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