Joshua Lederberg

“By the time I was 12 or 13, I was studying biochemistry textbooks.”

“I did get a very fine education, and not just in science. It took some pressure on the part of my elders to convince me that I really should take an interest in humanities.”

“Life's a hobby.”

“So many of the things I've predicted were technologies that were just sitting right in front of us.”

“If we have isolated individuals able to inflict enormous harm, imagine what a single lunatic can do with a nuclear weapon. I think the whole base of civil society is at risk.”

“I was making a lot of momentous personal decisions. I was still very very young: when the prize was awarded, I was 33; the work I had done when I was 21.”

“I wish I had a talent for dropping things as well as taking on new ones. It gets to be quite a clutter after a while.”

“I think we have to believe we are here for some purpose, and I know there are many cynics who will deny it, but they don't live as if they deny it.”

“I'd like to put in a vote for the intrinsic fascination of science.”

“I don't believe anybody can really grasp everything that's even in one textbook.”

“My ambitions were already very clearly fixed by the time I was 6 or 7.”

“Being successful at a very young age gave me the confidence and the capability to try out other things.”

“If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.”

“I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room.”

“I'm not easily inhibited by the fact that I don't know something about a subject. It doesn't stop me from dabbling in it.”