Arthur Kornberg

I told my three sons stories about germs more than fifty years ago as fanciful bedtime tales.

The pursuit of curiosity about the basic facts of nature has proven, with few exceptions throughout the history of medical science, to be the route by which the successful drugs and devices of modern medicine were discovered.

As in biomedical science, pioneering industrial inventions have not been mothered by necessity. Rather, inventions for which there was no commercial use only later became the commercial airplanes, xerography and lasers on which modern society depends.