Science Quote by Peter Agre

Agre’s line does something scientists are often trained not to do: it openly values utility without sounding like a grant proposal. By calling the Nobel “remarkable” because it rewards not just “discoveries” but their “usefulness,” he’s quietly arguing for a particular kind of scientific virtue - the kind that converts insight into infrastructure for future knowledge. The subtext is that a finding isn’t fully alive until other researchers can build on it, replicate it, and use it as a tool.

That distinction matters in Nobel culture, which loves the lone breakthrough narrative. Agre nudges the spotlight away from the romantic “Eureka!” moment toward the slower, more communal afterlife of a result: methods adopted, fields unlocked, questions made newly askable. It’s a scientist’s way of insisting that impact isn’t only measured in headlines or applications in the marketplace, but in how a discovery reshapes the internal architecture of “fundamental science” itself.

The phrasing also reads as gentle boundary-setting. By specifying “advancement of fundamental science,” Agre sidesteps the common pressure to justify research purely through immediate societal payoff. He’s not endorsing product-driven science; he’s defending the idea that usefulness can be intrinsic to basic research, where a mechanism, a channel, a technique becomes a platform for entire subdisciplines.

Contextually, it fits Agre’s own legacy: work celebrated not only for what it revealed, but for what it enabled. The Nobel, in his telling, is less a medal for a moment than a certification that the discovery has become durable.