Madness and Memory Quotes

“Hilary Koprowski sent me a slide entitled “Four Stages of Adopting a New Idea.” • The first is, “It’s impossible, it’s nonsense, don’t waste my time.” • The second is, “Maybe it’s possible, but it’s weak and uninteresting. It’s clearly not important.” • The third is, “It’s true and I told you so. I always said it was a good idea.” • And the fourth is, “I thought of it first.”
― Stanley B. Prusiner, Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions—A New Biological Principle of Disease

“It often happens, with regard to new inventions, that one part of the general public finds them useless and another part considers them to be impossible. When it becomes clear that the possibility and the usefulness can no longer be denied, most agree that the thing was fairly easy to discover and that they knew it was significant. —Abraham Edelcrantz, Treatise on Telegraphs (1796)”
― Stanley B. Prusiner, Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions—A New Biological Principle of Disease

“This vignette reminds me of Maurice Maeterlinck’s dictum: “At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, tradition has placed, against each of us, ten thousand men to guard the past.”
― Stanley B. Prusiner, Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions—A New Biological Principle of Disease

“The skeptical and frequently hostile reactions to prions from many precincts of the scientific community reflected resistance to a profound change in thinking. Prions were seen as an anomaly: they reproduce and infect but contain no genetic material—neither DNA nor RNA; thus they constitute a disruptive transition in our understanding of the biological world.”
― Stanley B. Prusiner, Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions--A New Biological Principle of Disease