Roderick MacKinnon

“I find I get fixed in my ways if I don't change. I think I take too many things for granted.”

“I was a daydreamer. Teachers kept telling me to pay attention.”

“I think funding risky projects is very important.”

“I always say to my students that being a scientist is like being an explorer, and I really mean that because, in a sense, I think in science we explore the world, the universe around us.”

“I always say, 'Let your experiment speak to you.' What I mean by that is I - actually, we, or, at least, I'm not smart enough, actually, to guess how nature is working, but by looking and doing the right experiments and paying close attention to the subtleties of it, you start to catch on.”

“You hear a lot of scientists say the same thing. It doesn't have to be a big thing because the thing about being a scientist is even the little things are big things to us.”

“Some people look at big things, and other people look at very small things, but in a sense, we're all trying to understand the world around us.”