Politics & Power Quote by John Pople

Pople takes the most ceremonial sentence in the scientific world and quietly reroutes its spotlight. A Nobel Prize is designed to crown an individual; his first move is to widen the frame until the “I” feels almost incidental. The opening clause, “I am delighted,” reads deliberately modest - an English restraint that keeps triumph from curdling into self-mythology. He doesn’t claim to have built a field alone. He claims to have been built by a network.

The key word is “learned.” Pople, whose work helped make computational chemistry a backbone of modern research, is speaking from a discipline where credit is both fiercely contested and structurally messy: graduate students do the labor, collaborators supply ideas, institutions supply resources, and prizes still land on a nameplate. By saying he learned “so much of what I know” from “students” as well as “colleagues,” he inverts the standard hierarchy. It’s not just graciousness; it’s a subtle argument about how knowledge actually moves - upward, sideways, across borders, through conversations and code as much as through lone genius.

Then comes the diplomatic kicker: “so many nations.” In the late-20th-century academy, international mobility is both privilege and engine, especially in a field dependent on shared methods and computing infrastructure. Pople presents science as an inherently transnational commons, and the Nobel as an occasion to acknowledge that fact. “This Nobel Award honours them all” isn’t literal; it’s corrective. He’s laundering prestige back into the collective that produced it, insisting the real achievement is the community that made the work possible.