Quote

In 1998, I set up and directed a research group at the Nanotechnology Institute newly created in the Research Center of Karlsruhe. This allowed to offer to former post-doctoral coworkers the opportunity to develop and to progressively set up independent research activities in nanoscience and nanotechnology.

Science is very cross-generational; you're not just aiming it at twentysomethings, or eightysomethings. Every town's got a really broad selection of people and age groups interested in science.

Small science, which includes most research in the life sciences all over the world, is science directed usually by an individual senior scientist and a small team of junior associates, perhaps three, ten, fifteen, something in that order.

I was very fortunate to be elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is, in effect, a small research center where you are given three years to do whatever work you want.

I wandered along to the chemistry labs, more or less on the rebound, and asked about becoming a research student. It was the '60s, a time of university expansion: the doors were open, and a 2:1 was good enough to get me in.

Around 1960, I moved back to Europe, attracted by the newly founded European Organization for Nuclear Research where, for the first time, the idea of a joint European effort in a field of pure science was to be tried in practice.

I believe that our office has clearly been the leader in building coalitions, in getting other universities across the contrary to interact more effectively with the government and particularly the Congress.

The whole structure of science gradually grows, but only as it is built upon a firm foundation of past research.

At Berkeley I had my first encounter with real professional scientists.

People wanted to do science outside of classical institutions like universities or big corporations, so we embraced it.