Eric Betzig

“There are many cells you could look at forever in 3D.”

“I really didn't like the academic structure of science, but I realized I loved science and missed science.”

“Science goes through fads, and there are big ups and crashes.”

“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.”

“It takes a huge amount of effort to move from a successful high-tech prototype to broader adoption of an imaging technology.”

“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.”

“I don't like saying 'no' to people, and I'm going to have to learn how to say 'no' more.”

“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.”

“When I listen to music from different eras, I sense different things. The 1940s music, there's so much optimism and romance, maybe because they just solved the biggest problem on Earth at that time - World War II. In the 1960s, there was so much creativity and innovation in sound.”

“In my opinion, the only real asset one has is one's reputation, right? I mean, any company and institution can go belly up at any time. But if you have a good reputation, you know, you can usually find somebody who can - who thinks they can use what you have to offer.”

“Every new invention is like a baby. You think it may cure cancer or become the president, but in the end, you're happy it just stays out of jail.”

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

“Honestly, I feel you are poisoned if you read too much of the scientific literature because it makes you start thinking like other people. You're better off having a vague sense of what's going on and making your own way.”

“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.”

“Chemistry was always my weakest subject in high school and college.”

“I hate driving a bandwagon.”

“We can track and see the production of single molecules, trace them and see how they assemble into structures.”

“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.”

“You need a continuous picture of how things are evolving, and not a slow series of snapshots where you don't know how frame A is related to frame B.”