Lewis Thomas

Science is the most communal of human endeavors. The vast structures of physics and biology assembled in this century were put together piece by piece by countless people whose identity has by this time been forgotten. The major figures, whose names are stamped there perhaps forever, were gifted in being able to figure out where the key pieces would fit, but the pieces themselves came from other minds and hands. Albert Szent-Georgi once remarked: "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."