Science Quote by Haldan Keffer Hartline

Hartline’s sentence is a polite piece of scientific politics, the kind that sounds like ceremonial throat-clearing until you notice how carefully it sets the terms of the conversation. By invoking Alfred Nobel, he borrows the founder’s moral authority to legitimize a modern demand: research should pay off. “Tangible benefits” is the key phrase, doing double duty as promise and shield. It reassures the public (and the funders) that physiology and medicine aren’t ivory-tower hobbies, while also implying that the proper judges of usefulness are the experts themselves.

The quiet power move comes next: “as are we all.” That small piece of consensus-building collapses disagreement in advance. Who wants to be the person arguing against benefits, against practicality, against health? Hartline frames the desire for payoff as a shared, almost natural instinct, sidestepping harder questions about timelines, uncertainty, and the fact that the most transformative biomedical leaps often arrive indirectly, through basic research that looks pointless until it suddenly isn’t.

Then he narrows the gate. The “Faculty of the Caroline Institute” (the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska) is described as “ever… alert” to “recognize practical benefits.” Recognize, not predict; recognize, not manufacture. It’s a subtle defense of prize culture and peer judgment: we are not swayed by hype, he suggests, but we can spot real-world impact when it appears. In the postwar era of expanding research budgets and rising expectations for medical miracles, Hartline offers a compact bargain: trust the scientific institution, and it will translate discovery into something you can touch.