The thing I'm most interested in is the nervous system. How do brains grow? How do genes build complicated nervous systems?
Sydney BrennerRead
The art of doing science is doing the important things first.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes prioritizing essential tasks in scientific work.
Sydney Brenner's quote highlights the significance of focusing on the most crucial scientific endeavors before delving into less critical tasks. In the realm of science, where time and resources may be limited, it is vital to identify and tackle the most important experiments or questions first, as these can lead to substantial advancements and breakthroughs.
Themes
SciencePrioritizationImportant TasksInnovation
In practice
Example use cases
In a conference presentation about research methodology, this quote can illustrate the necessity of prioritizing significant research questions.
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The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable - it was the birth of molecular biology.
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As was predicted at the beginning of the Human Genome Project, getting the sequence will be the easy part as only technical issues are involved. The hard part will be finding out what it means, because this poses intellectual problems of how to understand the participation of the genes in the functions of living cells.
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It is now widely realized that nearly all the 'classical' problems of molecular biology have either been solved or will be solved in the next decade. The entry of large numbers of American and other biochemists into the field will ensure that all the chemical details of replication and transcription will be elucidated. Because of this, I have long felt that the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other fields of biology, notably development and the nervous system.
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