Science Quote by Daniel Nathans

There’s a quiet provocation in Nathans’s opening gambit: “First of all” signals he’s stepping into a public argument where biology is being underestimated, romanticized, or politely ignored. He isn’t offering a lyrical aphorism; he’s laying track for a scientific worldview that, in the late 20th century, was becoming newly actionable. Coming from a Nobel-winning molecular biologist who helped legitimize restriction enzymes as tools of modern genetics, the line reads like the preface to a case for gene-centered medicine, not a casual observation.

The phrasing is careful in a way that reveals its politics. “Influenced by, if not caused by” is a rhetorical hedge that doubles as a power move: it concedes complexity while tightening the noose around causality. Nathans anticipates pushback from clinicians, environmentalists, and anyone wary of genetic determinism. He acknowledges multifactorial reality, then nudges the audience toward a stronger claim: genes aren’t just background conditions; they can be prime movers.

“Mutations” does heavy lifting here. It frames disease not as moral failing, fate, or vague “bad luck,” but as a material glitch in information. That reframing underwrites an entire research agenda: map the genome, find the errors, build interventions. Subtextually, it’s also a rebuttal to the comforting idea that most illness is purely lifestyle or environment - a reminder that even the most disciplined body can be betrayed at the molecular level.

In context, this is the rhetoric of molecular biology’s ascendancy: an insistence that understanding life means reading, and sometimes editing, its code.