We are scientists but we are still humans and we cannot close our eyes or ears to what’s happening around us but somehow we just decided to put these things aside and try to make something positive out of all this negativity.’

[S]cientists are not robotic inducing machines that infer structures of explanation only from regularities observed in natural phenomena (assuming, as I doubt, that such a style of reasoning could ever achieve success in principle). Scientists are human beings, immersed in culture, and struggling with all the curious tools of inference that mind permits […]. Culture can potentiate as well as constrain—as Darwin's translation of Adam Smith's laissez-faire economic models into biology as the theory of natural selection. In any case, objective minds do not exist outside culture, so we must make the best of our ineluctable embedding.

If it seems shocking to some that scientists are not cold computers but human beings with different preferences, dispositions, skills and temperaments then they must have a very strange idea of how people think. Science is indeed a rational pursuit par excellence. But it does violence to the notion of rationality if we pretend that it is not a complicated, somewhat messy capacity.

Scientist are human. Unraveling the knots of Nature's mysteries is a reward in itself; but even so, scientists like to hear the applause of the audience

Indulge your passion for science…but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

I am a reasonably emotional person, and I see no reason why that's incompatible with being a scientist. Even if we learn about how everything works, that doesn't mean anything at all. You can reduce how an impala leaps to a bunch of biomechanical equations. You can turn Bach into contrapuntal equations, and that doesn't reduce in the slightest our capacity to be moved by a gazelle leaping or Bach thundering. There is no reason to be less moved by nature around us simply because it's revealed to have more layers of complexity than we first observed. The more important reason why people shouldn't be afraid is, we're never going to inadvertently go and explain everything. We may learn everything about something, and we may learn something about everything, but we're never going to learn everything about everything. When you study science, and especially these realms of the biology of what makes us human, what's clear is that every time you find out something, that brings up ten new questions, and half of those are better questions than you started with.

There are many of us and we're not just poets. We're teachers. We're dancers. Essentially, we're human beings. And you would think that at this time we would not have to say that. But we still are in the position, strangely enough, that we still have to remind people and the public that: We're still here, we're still active. We have active, living cultures and we are human beings and we write poetry. (2020)

Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.

Even a scientist is a human being. So it is natural for him, like others, to hate the things he cannot explain. It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.

Great scientists are persevering and never deterred by difficulties

Even though it’s applied science we’re dealin’ with, it still is – science!

[When] we practice science (and this is true of all our experience), we are always decoding a part of nature which is not complete. We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness.

Science is what we do when we don't know what we're doing.

Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting,