Science Quote by William Standish Knowles

The jab lands because it’s delivered with a scientist’s deadpan restraint: “any chemist that could breathe” turns an entire hiring market into a single, low bar. Knowles isn’t just reminiscing about a boom time; he’s compressing an era’s priorities into a grim little physiological requirement. The line carries the faint aftertaste of industrial urgency, when demand for chemical expertise outpaced the ability (or willingness) to vet talent, ethics, or even fit. Breathing becomes the credential; everything else is negotiable.

The intent reads as both humor and warning. Humor, because the exaggeration is crisp and specific - not “anyone,” but “any chemist,” as if the field itself was a passport to employment. Warning, because it hints at what gets lost when industry runs hot: mentorship, rigor, and the slower cultivation of judgment. Knowles, a Nobel-winning chemist who came up through mid-century American chemistry, is gesturing at the postwar expansion of corporate labs and the broader “chemistry as infrastructure” moment - plastics, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, defense. When the world is being remade in polymers and pills, the labor market stops asking whether a chemist is good and starts asking whether a chemist exists.

Subtext: talent was abundant enough to be exploited and scarce enough to be indiscriminately absorbed. The line also sneaks in a survivor’s perspective - the absurd luck of entering a field when the door was wide open, before credential inflation and hyper-specialization narrowed the path. It’s nostalgia with an edge: the golden age wasn’t purely golden; it was chaotic, hungry, and sometimes dangerously indifferent to standards.