"Human curiosity, the urge to know, is a powerful force and is perhaps the best secret weapon of all in the struggle to unravel the workings of the natural world"
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Klug frames curiosity not as a soft virtue but as tactical power: a "secret weapon" in a fight with nature that’s less romantic stroll than sustained siege. Coming from a physicist who helped pioneer structural biology through X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy, the metaphor lands with particular authority. In a lab, progress rarely arrives as a single eureka; it comes from stubborn questions asked at the edge of what instruments can resolve, from the willingness to doubt a model and re-run the experiment. Curiosity, in that world, is less wonder than disciplined impatience.
The line also smuggles in a rebuke to the era of science as just technology delivery. By elevating "the urge to know" over any specific tool, Klug implies that method and machinery are secondary to the cognitive posture that keeps them honest. It’s a quiet argument against bureaucratized research culture: grants, metrics, and fashionable topics can be mimicked; genuine curiosity can’t. That’s why it’s "secret" - not because it’s hidden, but because it’s undervalued, hard to quantify, and therefore easy to neglect.
"Struggle" is doing heavy lifting here. Nature isn’t sentimental; it doesn’t yield to good intentions. The phrase acknowledges scientific work as adversarial in the productive sense: the natural world resists, data misleads, hypotheses fail. Curiosity is the force that keeps people returning to that resistance, turning frustration into inquiry until the mechanisms finally come into focus.
The line also smuggles in a rebuke to the era of science as just technology delivery. By elevating "the urge to know" over any specific tool, Klug implies that method and machinery are secondary to the cognitive posture that keeps them honest. It’s a quiet argument against bureaucratized research culture: grants, metrics, and fashionable topics can be mimicked; genuine curiosity can’t. That’s why it’s "secret" - not because it’s hidden, but because it’s undervalued, hard to quantify, and therefore easy to neglect.
"Struggle" is doing heavy lifting here. Nature isn’t sentimental; it doesn’t yield to good intentions. The phrase acknowledges scientific work as adversarial in the productive sense: the natural world resists, data misleads, hypotheses fail. Curiosity is the force that keeps people returning to that resistance, turning frustration into inquiry until the mechanisms finally come into focus.
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| Topic | Knowledge |
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