When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells.

- Joshua Lederberg

I was making a lot of momentous personal decisions. I was still very very young: when the prize was awarded, I was 33; the work I had done when I was 21.

- Joshua Lederberg

So many of the things I've predicted were technologies that were just sitting right in front of us.

- Joshua Lederberg

My ambitions were already very clearly fixed by the time I was 6 or 7.

- Joshua Lederberg

Everybody has to learn for the first time.

- Joshua Lederberg

As soon as you go into any biological process in any real detail, you discover it's open-ended in terms of what needs to be found out about it.

- Joshua Lederberg

A Swedish newspaper reporter called and said, You've been awarded the Prize. I was quite sure it was a practical joke.

- Joshua Lederberg

If lifespan jumps by 30 or 40 years, that has enormous implications.

- Joshua Lederberg

Although I am a public figure, I'm still a little shy. I don't think my own personality is important. I prefer to keep some small dosage of privacy.

- Joshua Lederberg

I'm chairing a UNESCO committee on how to improve global Internet communications for science; help third-world people get onto the Net so they can be part of the process.

- Joshua Lederberg

If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing.

- Joshua Lederberg

If we have isolated individuals able to inflict enormous harm, imagine what a single lunatic can do with a nuclear weapon. I think the whole base of civil society is at risk.

- Joshua Lederberg

I started on the use of the Internet for scientific communication. Our research group was one of the very first to make really systematic use of it as a way of managing research projects.

- Joshua Lederberg

We are all very individual. You have to find out what you can do best, and be self-conscious about that.

- Joshua Lederberg

Try hard to find out what you're good at and what your passions are, and where the two converge, and build your life around that.

- Joshua Lederberg

To have the recognition of your colleagues is great. The public attention is a mixed blessing.

- Joshua Lederberg

If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.

- Joshua Lederberg

If it takes you 20 or 25 years to establish yourself in one field, you really ought to be careful not to stray too far.

- Joshua Lederberg

I'd like to put in a vote for the intrinsic fascination of science.

- Joshua Lederberg

I hope I've lived a life of science whose style will encourage younger people.

- Joshua Lederberg