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Science Quote by Paul Nurse

"During the winter my attention was attracted to the changes in the stars and planets in the sky"

About this Quote

It reads like the calmest possible origin story for scientific obsession: not lightning-bolt genius, just a winter night when the sky starts behaving differently and you can’t unsee it. Paul Nurse, a biologist best known for decoding the cell cycle, isn’t trying to sound poetic here. The plainness is the point. The sentence models a scientist’s ethic of attention: the world changes, you notice, you follow the thread.

“During the winter” does quiet work as context and metaphor. Winter is when the outdoors thins out into essentials - longer darkness, clearer visibility, fewer distractions - the perfect laboratory for amateur astronomy and, more broadly, for noticing patterns. “My attention was attracted” is almost passive voice for curiosity: he’s implying that discovery begins before intention, that inquiry is often something that happens to you. The cosmos “attracts” attention the way an anomaly in a dataset does; it’s less romantic than it is compulsive.

The subtext is a defense of observation against the modern caricature of science as purely technical or instrument-driven. Nurse’s career sits in the era of molecular tools, big funding, and specialized jargon, yet he’s gesturing back to the oldest scientific impulse: look up, see a discrepancy, ask why. Stars and planets also carry a useful lesson in scale and patience. Their “changes” are subtle, periodic, legible only over time - a neat parallel to biology’s slow clocks and recurring cycles. In one modest line, he smuggles in a worldview: science starts with attention, and attention starts when something ordinary becomes strange.

Quote Details

TopicScience
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Nurse, Paul. (2026, January 16). During the winter my attention was attracted to the changes in the stars and planets in the sky. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/during-the-winter-my-attention-was-attracted-to-101126/

Chicago Style
Nurse, Paul. "During the winter my attention was attracted to the changes in the stars and planets in the sky." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/during-the-winter-my-attention-was-attracted-to-101126/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"During the winter my attention was attracted to the changes in the stars and planets in the sky." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/during-the-winter-my-attention-was-attracted-to-101126/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Paul Nurse (born January 25, 1949) is a Scientist from United Kingdom.

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