By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and you stretch your own mind, and very often you learn something new.
Walter Gilbert

Today we try to identify a gene and then study its properties.
Walter Gilbert

The best project is one that asks a novel question.
Walter Gilbert

It's easier to change what you do than people think it is. If you don't change, your field changes around you.
Walter Gilbert

Everyone wants a hand in the outcome, a piece of the knowledge.
Walter Gilbert

Scientists tend to be skeptical, but the weakness of the community of science is that it tends to move into preformed establishment modes that say this is the only way of doing science, the only valid view.
Walter Gilbert

In 15 years we'll have all the sequence, a list of the genes everyone has in common and those that differ among people. We know only something like a tenth of 1 percent of the sequence at the moment.
Walter Gilbert