Science Quote by Paul Nurse

There is something quietly strategic about a Nobel-winning scientist insisting he is still, of all things, a mountain walker and glider pilot. Paul Nurse isn’t offering a cute hobby list; he’s giving a rebuttal to the way scientific authority gets flattened into a lab coat and a talking head. The adverb "still" does most of the work: it pushes back against the expectation that senior scientists age into pure administration, pure abstraction, pure distance from risk and weather and muscle.

Mountain walking and gliding aren’t random pastimes, either. They’re disciplines that rhyme with research without sounding like a motivational poster. Walking mountains is slow, effortful, incremental progress with occasional sudden clarity when the terrain opens up. Gliding is precision, patience, and the ability to read invisible forces - an almost on-the-nose metaphor for working with systems you can’t touch directly. Both are about judgment under uncertainty, the acceptance that control is partial, and the refusal to confuse planning with certainty.

Context matters here: Nurse has spent his career explaining how living systems regulate themselves, and he has also been a public advocate for science as a human enterprise rather than a priesthood. The line performs that argument in miniature. It humanizes without shrinking him, and it signals that curiosity isn’t a job title. It’s a way of moving through the world - sometimes literally, by foot or by air, alert to patterns other people miss.