Science & Tech Quote by Sidney Altman

The charm here is in the mismatch between “intention” and outcome: a neat, almost bureaucratic plan (“enroll at McGill”) gets quietly steamrolled by contingency (“an unexpected series of events”). Altman, a scientist whose career would hinge on noticing what others missed, frames his origin story the way lab work often feels: you set up a hypothesis, then reality barges in with better data.

The sentence is studiously plain, which is the point. There’s no romantic mythology about destiny, no chest-thumping about ambition. Instead, the subtext is that prestige and trajectory are often retrofitted after the fact. MIT appears not as a trophy but as a byproduct of turbulence - an institution that functions here as shorthand for a certain intensity of training and a certain kind of intellectual permission. The phrase “unexpected series of events” is doing heavy lifting: it withholds the melodrama while insisting that lives, even accomplished ones, are routed through accidents, migrations, finances, mentors, politics - forces that rarely make it into Nobel citations.

Context matters: for a 20th-century North American scientist, the move from a strong Canadian university to an American research powerhouse tracks with the era’s gravitational pull toward U.S. funding and labs. The line reads like a modest correction to the heroic narrative of science. Not “I chose greatness,” but “I followed the vector.” In that restraint is a subtle argument about how discovery actually happens: not by pure will, but by being re-positioned, then staying curious enough to take advantage of it.