Science & Tech Quote by Joshua Lederberg

Lederberg is doing something quietly radical here: he’s borrowing the moral authority of religion without borrowing its metaphysics. By calling science a “calling,” he frames it not as a career ladder or a talent contest, but as a vocation with obligations. The key word is “legitimacy.” He’s anticipating a cultural suspicion that science is cold, opportunistic, or spiritually hollow, and answering it with a claim to equal seriousness: science can demand discipline, humility, sacrifice, and a lifelong fidelity to truth-seeking.

The subtext is also defensive in a distinctly mid-20th-century way. Lederberg came of age when “science” meant antibiotics, nuclear weapons, and the birth of molecular biology all at once - revelation and apocalypse in the same laboratory. In that landscape, scientists didn’t just discover; they also altered the conditions of life. A “calling” is a way to argue that those powers need an internal ethic, not just external regulation.

There’s a second, subtler move: he’s suggesting that awe is not the monopoly of faith. The religious register (“calling”) makes room for wonder without surrendering skepticism. Coming from a Nobel-winning geneticist who helped define modern microbiology and thought seriously about responsibility, it reads as a bid to humanize scientific ambition: not “we can,” but “we’re answerable.” In an era when expertise is often treated as either priesthood or conspiracy, Lederberg insists it should be closer to the former in duty, and the opposite in dogma.