Time & Perspective Quote by Paul Berg

There is a quiet pivot embedded in Berg's phrasing: the moment a PhD stops being a credential and becomes an identity. "Hooked" is the tell. It borrows the language of compulsion, even addiction, to describe something that in polite retrospection is usually framed as a rational choice. Berg makes the turn sound accidental, almost bodily: research isn't simply preferred; it gets under your skin. For a scientist who helped shape modern molecular biology and wrestled publicly with its risks, that word also hints at the seduction of discovery and the difficulty of walking away once you have tasted it.

The other half of the sentence is a compressed map of postwar science's fork in the road. Pharmaceutical industry versus academic research isn't just workplace aesthetics; it's a tension between proprietary pipelines and open-ended inquiry, between product timelines and questions that don't care about quarterly earnings. Berg doesn't demonize industry, but he casts academia as the place where curiosity, not deliverables, sets the agenda. The subtext is a mild confession: he once weighed the practical path, then surrendered to the less predictable one.

Context matters because Berg's era made that choice newly consequential. The rise of Big Pharma and the explosive promise of genetics turned biochemistry into both a commercial frontier and an ethical minefield. His understatement reads like a scientist's version of destiny: not a grand calling, just a switch flipped by the work itself. That restraint is precisely why it lands.