Science & Tech Quote by Paul Nurse

Science gets cast here as something more than a toolkit; it becomes a moral engine. When Paul Nurse calls it a "liberalising and progressive force for humanity", he’s not talking about party politics so much as a worldview: science as a practice that loosens the grip of superstition, parochialism, and inherited authority. The word "idealistic" is doing double duty. It’s a confession of faith and a preemptive defense against the obvious rebuttal: science also builds bombs, enables surveillance, and fuels inequality when its benefits are hoarded. Nurse signals he knows the ledger isn’t clean, but he’s staking his reputation on the direction of travel.

The phrasing matters. "View" foregrounds interpretation over certainty, a scientist acknowledging that the cultural meaning of science is not itself a lab result. "Force" suggests momentum and pressure - science as something that pushes societies whether they feel ready or not. "Liberalising" is the sharper term: it implies emancipation through knowledge, the widening of who gets to speak credibly about the world. That’s a direct rebuttal to the current mood of epistemic fragmentation, where expertise is treated as just another tribe.

Contextually, this reads like a defense of the postwar scientific settlement: public funding, international collaboration, peer review, and the promise that shared methods can outrun national myths. It’s also a quiet plea to keep science tethered to civic ideals - openness, accountability, universalism - rather than letting it be reduced to patents, prestige, or geopolitical leverage. Nurse isn’t claiming science is automatically good; he’s arguing it works best when we insist it should be.