Paul Berg quotes

Paul Berg was an American biochemist renowned for his pioneering work in recombinant DNA technology. His research transformed the field of genetic engineering and opened new possibilities in medicine and biology. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his groundbreaking contributions. Here are 13 of his quotes:

Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.

Paul Berg

With time, many of the facts I learned were forgotten but I never lost the excitement of discovery.

Paul Berg

Yet the effort to inform the public also encouraged responsible public discussion that succeeded in developing a consensus for the measured approach that many scientists supported.

Paul Berg

By that time I was hooked on a career in academic research instead of one in the pharmaceutical industry that I had originally considered in deciding to get a PhD.

Paul Berg

Novel technologies and ideas that impinge on human biology and their perceived impact on human values have renewed strains in the relationship between science and society.

Paul Berg

Moreover, the concern of some that moving DNA among species would breach customary breeding barriers and have profound effects on natural evolutionary processes has substantially disappeared as the science revealed that such exchanges occur in nature.

Paul Berg

That work led to the emergence of the recombinant DNA technology thereby providing a major tool for analyzing mammalian gene structure and function and formed the basis for me receiving the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Paul Berg

By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.

Paul Berg

Fears of creating new kinds of plagues or of altering human evolution or of irreversibly altering the environment were only some of the concerns that were rampant.

Paul Berg

But I felt it necessary to be part of the war effort and I enlisted in the Navy to be a flyer.

Paul Berg

Today, it is research with human embryonic stem cells and attempts to prepare cloned stem cells for research and medical therapies that are being disavowed as being ethically unacceptable.

Paul Berg