Paul Berg Quotes

During a recent visit to the United States, French President François Mitterrand stopped to tour California’s Silicon Valley, where he hoped to learn more about the ingenuity and entrepreneurial drive that gave birth to so many companies there. Over lunch, Mitterrand listened as Thomas Perkins, a partner in the venture capital fund that started Genentech Inc., extolled the virtues of the risk-taking investors who finance the entrepreneurs. Perkins was cut off by Stanford University Professor Paul Berg, who won a Nobel Prize for work in genetic engineering. He asked, ‘Where were you guys in the ’50s and ’60s when all the funding had to be done in the basic science? Most of the discoveries that have fuelled [the industry] were created back then.’ Henderson and Schrage, in the Washington Post (1984)

A. Scott Berg’s more recent Wilson; John Keegan’s wrenching The First World War; Martin Gilbert’s The First World War; Gerhard Ritter’s The Schlieffen Plan; Lowell Thomas’s 1928 book about World War I U-boats and their crews, Raiders of the Deep; Reinhard Scheer’s Germany’s High Sea Fleet in the World War; Churchill’s The World Crisis, 1911–1918; Paul Kennedy’s The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880–1914; and R. H. Gibson and Maurice Prendergast’s primer, The German Submarine War, 1914–1918. I

In a 2008 retrospective paper on the 1975 Asilomar conference that he co-organized—the conference that led to a moratorium on genetic modification of humans—the biologist Paul Berg wrote,16 There is a lesson in Asilomar for all of science: the best way to respond to concerns created by emerging knowledge or early-stage technologies is for scientists from publicly funded institutions to find common cause with the wider public about the best way to regulate—as early as possible. Once scientists from corporations begin to dominate the research enterprise, it will simply be too late.

But the maestro’s biggest project during the second half of the season was the first North American production of Paul Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue, on 29 March 1911. Ariane, a forward-looking, brilliantly orchestrated work, had had its premiere in Paris four years earlier, and had since been performed in Vienna, conducted by Alexander Zemlinsky and admired by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, among others. Toscanini,