You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.

Here's a bunch of people practising a new set of behavioural norms. Apparently it didn't work because a lot of them got sick. That's the conclusion. You don't necessarily know why it happened. But you start there.

You can't ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket.

Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.

It's not blaming the victim. It's not anybody's fault. They just did something that didn't work, that's all.

My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.