Eric Betzig

I missed the basic curiosity of being in the lab. ”

It always irritated me that people think they have to be locked into a career path. ”

The eventual goal is to marry all of my work together to make a high-speed, high-resolution, low-impact tool that can look deep inside biological systems. ”

You get so tied up with the minutiae of the day-to-day, there's never a chance to sit back and let your subconscious run wild. ”

Like you can't have a car that can take the kids to schools on Friday and win the grand prix on Saturday, you can't make a microscope that can do it all. ”

I'm spoiled. All of my adult jobs have left me with complete freedom to come up with what I wanted. ”

I hate driving a bandwagon. ”

One thing I liked about being in microscopy is it gets you out of your box constantly because there's such a diverse range of applications. ”

I was born in 1960 and can still tell you the name of every astronaut from Mercury to Apollo. If I had a chance, I'd love to go into space on one of the privately developed space crafts. ”

It's nice to be able to look at one protein, but life is driven by the interactions between proteins, so it's really essential to be able to see multiple proteins at a time to understand these interactions. ”