Science & Tech Quote by Paul Nurse

Good science, Paul Nurse implies, is less a heroic sprint than a punishing endurance sport, and that framing quietly rewrites what counts as “ambition” in research. The line does two things at once: it praises rigor and it imposes an ethical filter. If the work is inherently hard - intellectually, technically, emotionally - then choosing a trivial question isn’t just inefficient; it’s a kind of moral misallocation.

The phrasing is telling. “Pursuit” casts science as chase rather than possession, while “so difficult” nods to the everyday friction outsiders rarely see: dead ends, finicky methods, ambiguous results, and the constant risk of being wrong in public. Nurse’s key pivot is “essential,” which turns a personal preference into a standard. He’s not romanticizing struggle for its own sake; he’s arguing that difficulty demands justification.

Subtext: this is also a critique of the incentives that steer scientists toward safe, incremental projects that are publishable but low-stakes. By insisting the problem be “important,” Nurse pushes against a culture where prestige can attach to cleverness even when the underlying question is thin. Coming from a Nobel-winning biologist associated with landmark work on the cell cycle, it reads like a retrospective thesis statement: the right question is a form of discipline, not just inspiration.

Contextually, it’s a reminder that science is opportunity cost made visible. Time, funding, and attention are finite. Nurse’s sentence is a quiet argument for triage: if you’re going to pay the price of rigor, spend it where it can matter.