Science Quote by Daniel Nathans

A Nobel-winning biologist reminding you that human exceptionalism is a budget choice, not a law of nature. Nathans’ line is calibrated to puncture the reflex that “important” biology equals human biology. He does it with a sly pivot: not only are people not uniquely interesting, they’re not even the default. The phrase “only interesting organism” sounds like dinner-table common sense; he treats it like a scientific category error.

The subtext is pragmatic and a little mischievous. Nathans isn’t selling a mystical reverence for nature. He frames interest in terms that move institutions: “scientific or commercial value.” That pairing matters. In the late 20th century, molecular biology was booming, and the gravitational pull of medicine and pharma threatened to narrow basic research into a pipeline for human therapeutics. Nathans—associated with restriction enzymes and the model-organism revolution—knows that the tools that remake medicine often come from organisms nobody originally studied “for” medicine: bacteria, viruses, yeast, flies. The engine of discovery runs on the weird, the small, the inconveniently non-human.

There’s also an ethical edge without sermonizing. By granting other organisms “value” in the same breath as commerce, he exposes how we justify attention: we fund what we can monetize, we praise what we can cure. Nathans argues for curiosity as infrastructure. Study life broadly and you don’t just get prettier textbooks; you get the next technique, the next drug target, the next conceptual breakthrough. The quote works because it demotes us, then immediately shows how that demotion pays dividends.