No matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, basic research has proven over and over to be the lifeline of practical advances in medicine.

Without advances, medicine regresses and reverts to witchcraft.

Prejudging that research through a political process would be irresponsible. This isn't medicine; this is drug legalization.

I am interested in physical medicine because my father was. I am interested in medical research because I believe in it. I am interested in arthritis because I have it.

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.

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