Joanne Peng

"My philosophy is that it's important, in a curious way, for scientists to be courageous. Not physically courageous, but courageous in an intellectual way. I believe that by working on extremely hard problems, by being courageous, you may succeed. But even if you fail, you fail gloriously."

"Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real."

"This cannot be done in one step; we cannot decompose a human being into elementary particles and ask for the probability that these reassemble into the same human being, with the same genes, immune system and memories. This is absurd reductionism and if it could happen it would indeed be a miracle."

"I always maintain that the best attribute we had was our naïveté… I think if we had known about all the problems we were going to encounter, we would have thought twice about starting… Naïveté was the extra added ingredient in biotechnology." [Genentech founder]

"On the whole, the successful theories of biology always have been and are still today simple and concrete. Presumably this is not accidental, but is bound up with the fact that every biological phenomenon is essentially an historical one, one unique situation in the infinite total complex of life."

"It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag."

"But what's most depressing comes from purely selfish reasons: if groundbreaking science really requires assembling teams of people with proper credentials from different disciplines, then I have made some very bad career moves."

"The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it."

"All things have their vivid aspects, even the uninteresting or ugly; one must only want to see."

"In so doing, there is often an element of reinventing the already known. […] This might look wasteful if you think what they are doing is research. But it is not if you realize that they are building up their ability to perceive the evolution of their own thought, their capacity for attention."

"This stage is characterized by a sense of frustration at the complexity of the process, and by a sinking feeling that despite all that intense digging the promised cure-all may not materialize."

"You must wish to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes!"

"Uncertainty is the price of beauty, and integrity the only compass for the territory of uncertainty that constitutes the landmass of any given life."

"If two people managed not to get stuck in hatred during their honest struggles with each other…if they could stay fluid… a mutually human and friendly consideration remained available to them, then their decision to separate cannot easily conjure disaster and terror."

"And then, finally, there's choice five. It's hard to state this one. About as close as I can come to it is this: Hang loose, but stay vibrantly alive."

"Of the three main activities involved in scientific research, thinking, talking and doing, I much prefer the last and am probably best at it. I am all right at the thinking, but not much good at the talking." (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1968 & 1980)

"The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite."

"In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was."

"Night science is where we explore the unstructured realm of possible hypotheses, of ideas not yet fully fleshed out. In day science, we falsify hypotheses and observe which are left standing; in night science, we create them."