Parenting & Family Quote by John Pople

For a Nobel-level scientist, this is a deliberately unglamorous kind of brag: a reminder that even the people who get crowned with “Laureate” status are propped up by ordinary, domestic scaffolding. Pople’s phrasing performs two moves at once. First, it slots him into a club (“Like many other Laureates”), signaling humility while quietly reaffirming prestige. He’s not denying the hierarchy; he’s smoothing its edges, presenting top-tier achievement as something that reliably comes with a spouse and kids in the background, steadying the ladder.

The second move is more revealing. “Benefit immeasurably” turns family into an enabling technology - an emotional infrastructure that can’t be quantified but can be credited. Coming from a scientist whose career centered on making the invisible calculable (computational chemistry), the line’s gentle irony is that the most important variable in the equation is the one he refuses to measure. It’s a public acknowledgment that the myth of the lone genius is just that: a myth, sustained by unseen labor, patience, and sacrifice at home.

The context matters: laureate remarks are ritualistic, and this is part of the ritual’s moral economy. You accept individual honors while paying your social debts out loud. Still, the sentence also hints at the era’s assumptions - that “support” flows toward the male achiever, and the family’s role is to absorb the costs of obsessive work. Gratitude, yes, but also a quiet snapshot of how excellence has historically been subsidized.