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
authentic death invention rather seems
In fact, death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.
estimates far hoped major number run
As far as I know, the most conservative estimates of the number of Americans who would be killed in a major nuclear attack, with everything working as well as can be hoped and all foreseeable precautions taken, run to about fifty million.
using
The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one.
material nuclear obtained tradition utterly war worth
There is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.
science knowing would-be
It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
science age littles
Science goes from question to question; big questions, and little, tentative answers. The questions as they age grow ever broader, the answers are seen to be more limited.
knowledge gay men
A scientist should be the happiest of men. Not that science isn't serious; but as everyone knows, being serious is one way of being happy, just as being gay is one way of being unhappy.
long way evolution
Death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.
mistake winning competition
The thought that we're in competition with Russians or with Chinese is all a mistake, and trivial. We are one species, with a world to win.
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.
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.