Science Quote by Daniel Nathans

The throwaway “of course” is doing a lot of work here. Nathans isn’t merely predicting a benefit; he’s insisting on inevitability, framing gene and protein cataloging as a commonsense precondition for medical progress rather than a speculative gamble. That rhetorical move mattered in the era this line comes from, when the Human Genome Project and large-scale molecular biology were still fighting for public money, political patience, and ethical permission. “Of course” tells skeptics: the payoff is baked in.

The sentence is also an advertisement for a particular kind of science: comprehensive, infrastructural, and data-heavy. “Identifying all human genes and proteins” sounds neutral, even clerical, but it smuggles in a worldview that illness is ultimately legible at the molecular level. If you can name every part, you can diagnose every malfunction; if you can map every pathway, you can reroute disease. That’s the seduction of omics before “omics” became a punchline: the fantasy that completeness equals control.

Yet Nathans keeps the promise carefully broad. “Great medical significance” avoids guarantees about cures, timelines, or who benefits. It’s optimistic without being falsifiable - a scientist’s version of a political pledge. The subtext is both ambition and restraint: a bid to legitimize vast basic-research projects while acknowledging, implicitly, that translation from catalog to clinic is messy.

Read today, the line lands with a double edge. Genomics has delivered real, often uneven gains - rare-disease diagnosis, targeted therapies, risk prediction - alongside hype, privacy fights, and disparities. Nathans’ certainty feels less naive than strategic: a compact justification for building the molecular map before anyone can argue about the route.