Science Quote by Paul D. Boyer

Boyer’s line is a scientist’s humblebrag with teeth: it flatters “choice” while quietly crediting “luck,” then binds both to the harsh reality of working with partial data. In a culture that treats discovery as either genius lightning or spreadsheet inevitability, he plants himself in the messier middle. Science, as practiced, is decision-making under uncertainty: you pick an assay, a model organism, a collaborator, a hypothesis worth bleeding time into. Most of those bets are placed before the evidence is tidy enough to look impressive in a retrospective Nobel lecture.

The phrasing does two things at once. “Tendency to be lucky” depersonalizes success, pushing against the myth that great scientists simply see further because they’re smarter. Yet he doesn’t retreat into pure randomness. “Make the right choices” reasserts agency, suggesting a cultivated instinct: pattern recognition built from years of failure, apprenticeship, and relentless exposure to ambiguous results. That’s the subtext: good judgment often looks like clairvoyance only after the fact.

Context matters because Boyer’s career sits inside the 20th-century machinery of big, competitive biochemistry, where priority disputes and incremental advances can decide who gets remembered. Calling his own path “limited information” is a quiet acknowledgment of contingency: the experiment could have fizzled, the field could have turned, a rival could have published first. It’s also a critique of the way we narrate science backward, sanding off uncertainty until discovery becomes destiny. Boyer leaves the uncertainty in, and that honesty is the point.