37 Quotes by Walter Gilbert

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.

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

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

The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.

The best project is one that asks a novel question.

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

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.

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

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