Time & Perspective Quote by Paul Nurse

There is a quiet rebuke hiding inside Paul Nurse's modest confession: if you want to understand how science actually gets done, stop pretending it can be measured on a clock. By framing himself as "never very good at exams", Nurse punctures the myth that high-stakes testing is a neutral proxy for intelligence. He doesn't romanticize failure; he points to a mismatch between what exams reward (fast recall, performance under pressure, compliance with a narrow format) and what his work required (curiosity, persistence, the stamina to chase a question past the syllabus).

The phrase "rather artificial" is doing heavy lifting. It's not just that exams are stressful or unfair; it's that they simulate a kind of thinking that rarely resembles real inquiry. In labs, the problem isn't "What do you remember right now?" It's "What can you figure out with time, tools, colleagues, and a willingness to be wrong in public?" His "poor memory" reads less like self-deprecation than a demotion of memorization as a gold standard. What matters is not stockpiling facts, but building systems for finding, testing, and revising them.

Then comes the most pointed line: "never seemed to be enough time to follow up things that really interested me". That's the subtextual indictment of schooling's scarcity model. Exams compress attention into what will be graded, turning intellectual life into triage. Coming from a Nobel-winning scientist, it's also a cultural permission slip: your path might look inefficient on paper and still be the straightest line to original work.