Science Quote by Paul Berg

You can hear the hinge of an era creak in that modest phrase, "slow transition". Berg isn’t bragging about a sudden epiphany; he’s describing a methodological migration, the kind that happens when a whole field quietly changes its center of gravity. Classical biochemistry had been spectacular at cataloging enzymes and pathways, but by the mid-20th century the deeper question was no longer just what molecules do. It was who gives the orders.

His wording is telling: "increasingly preoccupied" frames curiosity as a kind of productive obsession, the mental state that makes long experiments and ambiguous data tolerable. The paired clauses - "how genes act" and "how proteins are made" - sketch the central dogma without fanfare, as if the biggest idea in modern biology is simply the next logical place your attention lands when the older tools stop answering the most interesting questions. That restraint is part of the power: it normalizes revolution.

Context matters because Berg stands near the fault line. He came of age when DNA was becoming legible, then helped invent the techniques that made it writable. His later work in recombinant DNA didn’t emerge from sci-fi ambition but from the very preoccupation he describes: tracing the causal chain from genetic information to cellular machinery. The subtext is a portrait of scientific identity under revision - not abandoning biochemistry, but reinterpreting it through information. In retrospect, that "slow transition" reads like the moment biology stopped being primarily a chemistry of life and became, unmistakably, a science of instructions.