Science Quote by Paul Nurse

Curiosity is doing quiet rhetorical heavy lifting here: Paul Nurse isn’t crediting a gifted teacher, a prestigious lab, or some mythic “calling.” He’s framing a scientific life as the adult extension of a childhood habit - looking closely, asking why, refusing to let the world stay unexamined. That’s a deliberate demystification of expertise. The origin story isn’t genius; it’s attention.

The phrasing also performs a subtle bit of self-fashioning. “I think it was” softens the claim, signaling the scientist’s instinctive caution around certainty even in autobiography. Then “awoke” implies something latent waiting to be activated, not implanted from outside. Science, in this telling, isn’t a club you join; it’s a sensibility that gets switched on when the natural world feels irresistibly interesting.

Context matters: Nurse is a Nobel Prize-winning biologist associated with the rigorous, mechanistic study of the cell cycle. His work sits squarely in the tradition of explaining life through testable systems rather than romantic mystery. By pointing back to “the natural world,” he’s re-rooting high-level biomedical research in a more democratic starting point: the everyday strangeness of living things.

There’s cultural intent, too. At a time when science is often sold as innovation, industry, or national competitiveness, Nurse chooses the older, arguably purer motivator: wonder disciplined into method. It’s an implicit defense of basic research and of science education that prizes questions over credentials.