Francis Collins

Scientists must venture outside their comfort zones to show the public how cool - and how important - their work really is. ”

Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong. ”

I finished up my graduate degree in quantum mechanics, but underwent a bit of a personal crisis, recognizing that I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. It was too abstract, too far removed from human concerns. ”

The shelves of many evangelicals are full of books that point out the flaws in evolution, discuss it only as a theory, and almost imply that there's a conspiracy here to avoid the fact that evolution is actually flawed. All of those books, unfortunately, are based upon conclusions that no reasonable biologist would now accept. ”

If I'm walking down the riverbank, and a man is drowning, even if I don't know how to swim very well, I feel this urge that the right thing to do is to try to save that person. Evolution would tell me exactly the opposite: preserve your DNA. Who cares about the guy who's drowning? ”

A technological advance of a major sort almost always is overestimated in the short run for its consequences - and underestimated in the long run. ”