George Wald
George Wald
George David Waldwas an American scientist who is best known for his work with pigments in the retina. He won a share of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth18 November 1906
CountryUnited States of America
editing design choices
Evolution advances, not by a priori design, but by the selection of what works best out of whatever choices offer. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.
ocean men air
If the germ plasm wants to swim in the ocean, it makes itself a fish; if the germ plasm wants to fly in the air, it makes itself a bird. If it wants to go to Harvard, it makes itself a man. The strangest thing of all is that the germ plasm that we carry around within us has done all those things. There was a time, hundreds of millions of years ago, when it was making fish. Then ... amphibia ... reptiles ... mammals, and now it's making men.
balance nuclear weapons
Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.
hard-work trying may
I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company. I tell my students to try to know molecules, so well that when they have some question involving molecules, they can ask themselves, What would I do if I were that molecule? I tell them, Try to feel like a molecule; and if you work hard, who knows? Some day you may get to feel like a big molecule!
government
The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life.
twelve defense gross
So-called defense now absorbs sixty per cent of the national budget, and about twelve per cent of the Gross National Product.
science origin-of-life order
[Attributing the origin of life to spontaneous generation.] However improbable we regard this event, it will almost certainly happen at least once.... The time... is of the order of two billion years.... Given so much time, the "impossible" becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One only has to wait: time itself performs the miracles.
taken years civilization
Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.
trying unattainable students
I tell my students to try early in life to find an unattainable objective.
knows
A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.
communication technology space
I can conceive of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a so-called superior (or, if you wish, advanced) technology in outer space.
pain joy hard
When you have no experience of pain, it is rather hard to experience joy.
peace grateful heart
The Nobel Prize is an honor unique in the world in having found its way into the hearts and minds of simple people everywhere. It casts a light of peace and reason upon us all; and for that I am especially grateful.
future mean science
I think I know what is bothering the students. I think that what we are up against is a generation that is by no means sure that it has a future.