Science Quote by Haldan Keffer Hartline

A Nobel-era scientist insisting he is merely a stand-in is doing more than being politely modest; he is positioning science as a collective enterprise with a moral economy. Hartline’s “my two confreres and I” is a deliberately collegial phrase, old-world in diction, almost guild-like, and it matters: he’s not “colleagues” with a lab down the hall, he’s one of an international craft. The line “we stand…in some degree as representatives” performs a careful calibration. He claims symbolic authority while trimming it back, acknowledging the spotlight without pretending it belongs entirely to him.

The subtext is political in the small-p sense: mid-20th-century science, especially in physiology and vision research, was becoming big, networked, and institutionally funded. Awards and podiums still need faces, but Hartline reminds his audience that the real unit of progress is the field, not the individual. That “great number of fellow workers over the entire world” is a quiet rebuke to the lone-genius myth, and also a diplomatic nod across borders in a period when scientific cooperation lived alongside Cold War competition.

Even the phrase “enthusiastically active” does subtle work. It frames research as ongoing, energetic, and shared; he’s not accepting a trophy for a closed chapter, he’s underwriting a community that’s still moving. Hartline’s intent is to convert personal recognition into institutional legitimacy: honor the prize, then redistribute its meaning back to the many hands that made it possible.