"In 1995, I founded The Molecular Sciences Institute with a gift from the Philip Morris Company where I hoped that we could create an environment where young people could pursue science in an atmosphere of harmonious purpose and high intellectual challenge"
About this Quote
Brenner slips a small bomb into a sentence that otherwise reads like a mission statement: a cutting-edge scientific haven, underwritten by Philip Morris. The intent is plainly aspirational - he wanted an institute nimble enough to back young researchers and bold ideas outside the slow machinery of universities and federal grants. The phrasing is almost architectural: "environment", "atmosphere", "harmonious purpose". Science, in this framing, is less a lone-genius sport than a carefully engineered culture.
The subtext is what makes it bite. Brenner, a scientist with a famously dry intelligence, knows exactly how the funding source lands. Philip Morris isn't a neutral benefactor; it's the emblem of corporate money trying to buy legitimacy, goodwill, and proximity to credibility - especially in the 1990s, when tobacco companies were under intensifying legal and public-health scrutiny. By foregrounding the gift instead of burying it, he performs a kind of preemptive candor: yes, the money is tainted, but the project is pure. Or at least, he wants it to be.
"Young people" does cultural work here, too. It evokes innocence, future, talent in need of shelter - a moral counterweight to the sponsor's reputation. Brenner is staking a claim that scientific freedom sometimes requires uncomfortable patrons, and that an institute's ethics will be measured not by its donor roll but by whether it can sustain "high intellectual challenge" without becoming a laundering machine for corporate image.
The subtext is what makes it bite. Brenner, a scientist with a famously dry intelligence, knows exactly how the funding source lands. Philip Morris isn't a neutral benefactor; it's the emblem of corporate money trying to buy legitimacy, goodwill, and proximity to credibility - especially in the 1990s, when tobacco companies were under intensifying legal and public-health scrutiny. By foregrounding the gift instead of burying it, he performs a kind of preemptive candor: yes, the money is tainted, but the project is pure. Or at least, he wants it to be.
"Young people" does cultural work here, too. It evokes innocence, future, talent in need of shelter - a moral counterweight to the sponsor's reputation. Brenner is staking a claim that scientific freedom sometimes requires uncomfortable patrons, and that an institute's ethics will be measured not by its donor roll but by whether it can sustain "high intellectual challenge" without becoming a laundering machine for corporate image.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|
More Quotes by Sydney
Add to List
